Original '52 Tele Color?

[sunkidd]

Does anyone know, (Fuzzy?) if the Butterscotch color on the '52 Tele reissues the same as a factory new Tele that was made in '52? or did the original change colors, fade or darken, as the years went by and that is why the color of the reissue is Butterscotch... to simulate the ageing of the color?

[0le FUZZY]

There are no pix I jes haff ta dew it from memory.

As near as I kin member here in the first pix is watt they looked like in 52
and the later scudder-botch. We had a coffee table in 54 that
waz the same color as the Esquire (TELECASTER).

This will never be ant-sired its jes MHO and my ant-sir tew yer question.
Yes they aged tew the scudder-botch color.
.



Please visit my page

[lenny]

i think you can see under the pickguard where the color is lighter, from not being exposed to whatever a telecaster gets exposed to (beer spills, cigarette smoke, sweat:P)
they darken with age is the short answer

[Tiddles]

According to Duchossoir, the original Fender colour was always see-through Blonde, and never Butterscotch. Blonde remained the only standard colour from 1950 to 74, although "after 54 they have a creamier look, and in late 50's it was off-white". But each of these Blonde shades aged & discoloured to give what we now call butterscotch :? .

Ian

[Bill]

Then why are blonde (Mary Kaye) Strats such a different color from the Teles? They're both ash bodies.

Here's a 1957 Strat in blonde:

http://www.elderly.com/vintage/items/30U-9616.htm

By the way, I really, really want that one, but I'm $19,500 short.

[Tiddles]

Hi Bill:- Dunno! But as I say, that’s what it says in Duchossoir’s book. Just looking through photo’s of 50’s blonde Tele’s it seems like there’s plenty of variation – seems like early ones usually end up “butterscotch”, but after about 1954-55 many Teles seem to retain lighter blonde shades. I suppose in the 1950’s there was a fair bit of variation in the laquer & colour tints. No idea about the Strat at Elderly :? .

Ian.

[Kevin]

Well, you can't go by Duchossoir's book when it comes to paint. The man also claims that clear coats protect the finish from yellowing, when it's the clear coat that yellows....

Louie7 from the Weber board has a page somewhere (can't remember the link) that shows an almost-mint Broadcaster with the guard removed, and you can see that the color is pretty close to what Fuzzy showed above, but darker than what Fender used in the later 50's. They changed, again, in the mid-60's.

[Dacious]

Well, you can't go by Duchossoir's book when it comes to paint. The man also claims that clear coats protect the finish from yellowing, when it's the clear coat that yellows....

He does? The impression I gained from reading his book is the exact opposite - that he believed the yellowing was mainly the clear coat. That's the reason he gives for the '54 blondes starting whiter but turning out almost as yellow as '52s.

You can't believe anything you see on a computer screen or in the pages of a book. The reproduction from photography, either chemical film or digital to 4-colour printing, from the algorythms in the camera and video card firmware, to the program used to compose and crop the photos, will have changed the hue and saturation and possibly even the components of the colour in every step of the process.

No painter would ever try to match paint based on a computer image. Come back after the screen's been on for a couple hours and it'll change again!

Even if Tadeo Gomez was here today, and mixed his quart can of paint up for you, it wouldn't look the same as it did then because it would be minus 50 years of aging, and the paint today is almost certainly different formula to then.

So all you can do is get close.

Here's a '54:

http://tele.chookindustries.com/guit...tele6.jpg.HTML

Riddle me this, Batman:

Which is more blonde - the finish under the 'guard or the aged finish elsewhere?

[auger]

Here's L7's site, I think the King Tut Tele is the one that shows the colour under the pickguard.

Also, there was a picture from the Dallas guitar show posted here this week that shows some very nice early Telecasters and Esquiers that aren't so yellowed.
[/url]http://www.geocities.com/louie7.geo/L7GTARS/TELECASTERS.html

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Dacious

He does? The impression I gained from reading his book is the exact opposite - that he believed the yellowing was mainly the clear coat....

Yeah, my statement comes from the Strat book, which was revised after the Tele book was written. Thus, it's probably a "better" representation of Mr. Duchossoir's thoughts.

Originally Posted by Mr. Duchossoir, p. 55 of the Strat book

Differences in shades with ageing (sic) also depends on the thickness or even the absence of a clear top coat. For instance, some guitars finished in Olympic White during the 1960's have turned yellower than others because the color was not properly sealed with a top coat.

Now, anyone who has actually painted an Oly White guitar knows that it's the top coat that yellows -- not the paint. If you want it to stay white, you skip the top coats. Since Mr. Duchossoir claims the opposite, he basically lost all credibility with me -- at least as far as discussions of paint go.

[Dacious]

What he says is not the same as saying clear coats don't yellow, IMO. If the paint was nitro, it would be a reasonable surmise that it would yellow more without a clear topcoat - because colour-base paint is softer than clearcoats.

I don't think he claimed to be a paint expert - he also likely didn't know that the Olympic White used at Fender was Lucite, or acrylic laquer and not Duco or nitro, and therefore shouldn't yellow much anyway.

For instance, his book was written before this article

http://www.provide.net/~cfh/fenderc.html

I'm sure if he read this he would likely revisit his books for future editions and revise what he wrote.

I concede in this instance your point is correct, but it doesn't totally blow away his credibility or work regarding Tele colours.

To return to the original poster's question - Fender's colour is as good as anyone else's because there likely is no one colour that all these guitars were painted in. And even if there was one formula there would still be large variations in paint technique not to mention the fact that the wood appearance underneath likely varied a lot.