Mutchus

Among the many smaller jobs that have to be done to this vintage Hofner Colorama II is to flatten the warped plastic pickguard and rear tremolo cover. Here’s how they both looked before starting: Pickguard: Rear tremolo cover: I decided to tackle the rear tremolo cover first, since it appeared to be a much simpler job and also easier to replace should things go horribly wrong. I really couldn’t find any information about this on the Internet, so I did what seemed logical in my head, which was to sandwich the plastic in-between two panes of tempered glass, clamp the whole lot together, and heat it with a very hot hairdryer. Here’s the setup: After 10 or 15 minutes of heating the area above AND BELOW the cover, I took the top pane of glass off to confirm that the plastic had become soft, then clamped everything back in place and left it to cool naturally. Since I wasn’t in a hurry, I left it for 24 hours, although I’m sure that wasn’t necessary at all. The tremolo cover came out complete...

The tremolo arm on our vintage Hofner Colorama II is supposed to be held on with a type of thumb wheel screw, but that’s obviously been lost at some stage and the remaining stud/screw had been hammered down to act like a rivet and hold the tremolo arm on, irreversibly damaging it (the stud) in the process: The tremolo unit has already been removed from the guitar, but can be disassembled further by removing the big screw holding the arm lever on: Here's what we're left with: I've previously drilled into the stud to remove the arm, and the remaining stud has to be unscrewed as it is completely destroyed. That can be forced out with a pair of mole grips (vise-grips), by turning it in an anti-clockwise (counter clockwise) direction: There's quite a bit of rust on both this part and the tremolo unit itself, so a wire brush is used to remove it: I'm also rounding the front end of the lever, since it was originally square in shape and was catching on and damaging the trem...