In the 1960's the leading producer of Japanese-made beginner guitars was Teisco. The
customer in this case had brought in three that looked and acted their age, including one 4-
pickup "Melody" model, to be restored to working condition, mostly for use with a slide.
Since I didn't get any good pictures of the whole guitars, I am showing pictures I found online
so you get an idea what the guitars look like. There is a picture of the finished wiring in one
of the three pickup models. The wiring is so unusual we sketched schematics for both 3
and 4-pickup guitars for the files.
With each guitar, the steps were:
Disassemble and clean (clean through dirt and
residue to the finish, then wax and polish, scrape
the crud off the fingerboards, polish the frets, and
oil the rosewood, use various metal polishes to
get the chrome parts shining). Lubricate sticky
parts like tuners.
Test screws, glue dowels into loose screw holes, and supply missing screws. In two cases
the screw heads were so stripped the screws needed to be drilled out of the body.
Troubleshoot the electronics, rewire where necessary, and work inside the switches to get
them functioning again. Some controls required spray cleaning.
Two of the guitars required either badly damaged or missing string nuts replaced with
custom bone nuts. The Melody required a saddle to be fabricated.
Reassemble, string up, and test, then set the guitar up for relatively high action allowing both
comfortable finger playing and buzzless slide playing, before a final buff-up.
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