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Reloved Guitars' 'AristoCat' - Encore (India) Telecaster refurbishment - Part 1

841 views · Published 8 February 2017 · 1:26:23 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Sam Deeks · 2017 · Howto & Style

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This video shows me beginning the process of refurbishing this interesting beast - an Indian-made Encore Telecaster. I'd never seen or held one of these before and the first thing that surprised me was that it's a full weight, full thickness tele body. The 2nd think that struck me was the log-like neck: the same thickness from heel to headstock and with a flat 15"+ radius and that Encore headstock shape (to avoid any copyright issues with Fender). 

I had a spare maple Telecaster neck (from a Korean Squier) but in its 'natural' state it was 'orrible. Once again it was almost as thick as the Encore neck and worse, the radius was a quite unbelievable 18+" I did some quick research and I've not been able to find ANY reference anywhere to a Squier with such a flat radius. It's highly unusual. In addition to that Ibanez-like flatness the fingerboard was covered with a very thin layer of lacquer with lots of grain stripes showing through. 

So I decided to radically re-shape it, taking at least 1cm off the thickness of the neck over its whole length, pulling all the frets and re-radiusing it to 9.5". I sanded off the Squier logo and took it in the house to hand-lacquer it with rub-on Poly (having installed a Reloved logo on it). This took a few days and built up quite a nice thick layer - tinted slightly by mixing in some amber wood stain into the lacquer. 

Once the lacquer had set, I flattened it and polished it as well as I could by hand after which I re-cut the fret slots and re-fretted the neck with StewMac jumbo wire. 

This Part 1 video ends with me installing some 19:1 Wilkinson chrome tuners ready for fitting the neck onto the body (not shown yet) which has new hardware fitted (black pickguard, black control plate and Wilkinson top of the range pickups). I'll show that in the next video. 

So far the neck fits, the sacrificial strings are aligned well and the whole thing looks pretty good. Next stages will be to hook up the electrics to the control plate, some test playing before going into the set up and precision fret levelling stage. I think I'll buy some black tuners to match the other black hardware. 

One thing to note about this Tele: it has unusual (and possibly unique) bridge plate dimensions making my planned upgrade with a black Wilkinson bridge impossible. It turns out that none of the Tele bridges I had came anywhere near fitting so I was left with no real option but to re-use the original chrome bridge it came with. I chose to cover it in black Gorilla tape and install the Wilkinson paired saddles (black and brass) to retain its moody look. I think it works pretty well and short of finding a replacement in black (highly unlikely!) I think I'll leave it this way :-)

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