Brian
Joined: 22 Aug 2006
Posts: 1196
Location: Southern California
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 Posted: Sat Nov 25, 2006 3:43 am Post subject: Bob Warford's B Bender Telecaster (history and pix) |
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I thought I would post this info in it's own thread so in the future will be easy to find...
copied from another thread..
| Bob Warford wrote: | Steve-o:
(snipped some info about the Roy Noble....Telecaster content follows)
It was around Summer of 1967, after Clarence and I had played with Rick Nelson (Clarence on acoustic guitar, me on banjo, and a very impressive James Burton on electric) that I started getting really interested in electric guitar, and in August, having recently turned 21 years old, I went to hear Clarence play at a bar in a bowling alley in Culver City, CA. At that time, he was playing the sunburst Telecaster that went on to be the testbed for the first b-bender.
Initially, he loaned me a couple of electrics (a Mosrite and a Jazzmaster, as I recall..), and then I bought a couple of Fenders from dealers.
In November, 1967, I went to see him again, this time in El Monte, CA, at a club called Nashville West (although the house band at the time was called the Roustabouts, and had different players from the group of the same name as the club). At that point, Clarence was playing the white Telecaster that I now have. I still had the Noble at that time.
It seems to me that it was sometime in mid-1968 that I was talking to Clarence about electric guitar, and how taken I was with it, when he told me that the white Telecaster (which he had used on "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" sessions earlier that year) was not being used, because the bender (then referred to, I believe, as a "pull-string") had been completed on the sunburst Tele. He had played my Noble several times, and liked it, and I really liked the feel and sound of the white Telecaster, and we agreed to trade.
I wish I could fix the date of that trade more precisely, but I know it was not later than early 1969, and I think it was in the last half of 1968.
So there you have it - just about everything I can recall about the Noble acoustic, and how it got to Clarence.
Hope that helps, and if you (or anyone else, for that matter) have any other details to refine or correct my recollection, they would be welcome....
Bob |
| Bob Warford wrote: | Bill:
The brief (sorf of) version of the story, and answers to your questions are as follows:
First, as far as I know, there was only one shoulder-strap-actuated bender guitar in existence at the time, and that was Clarence's. The mechanism was so mysterious that I recall Gene Parsons telling me that Fender had people coming to venues where Clarence was playing, with cameras on poles to try to get photos of the guitar and mechanism. Mine turned out to be the second, as far as I know, and the only other one using the same Fender steel guitar parts as Gene used in Clarence's.
Anyway, thanks to the kindness and friendship of Clarence and Gene, Gene not only showed me the mechanism, but told me how they had used Fender steel guitar parts for the tuning fingers and rockers. Knowing what parts to get, I went to Fender and bought 4 of each of them. Both Clarence and Gene encouraged me to put a bender on my guitar. Gene also shared a problem that had developed with Clarence's guitar - originally, the lever that the strap hooked to was simply held to the body with a screw, but the torque of actuating the bender put lateral forces on the screw, and it gradually became loose in the wood. To fix that problem, Gene had drilled out a larger hole and lined it with a metal bushing, instead of staying with the wood screw fixation method.
My Dad was a mechanical engineer who had previously been a machinist, and he and I went over the design as shown to me by Gene. Dad felt that a system involving a bell crank would work well, and decided to use aluminum with teflon underneath it as a guide for the actuating lever, so the problem Gene had noticed would be avoided.
By this time, Clarence was using the mechanism only on the b string (remember that the original mechanism had tuning fingers on strings 1-4, to allow for combinations). For my guitar, I decided to still keep the possibility of mechanically bending 4 strings, but used the 2nd-5th strings, instead. The mechanism used allowed for sharping or flatting of each string, and the potential uses and combinations were still unknown.
Dad made drawings of the mechanism he designed (I should still have them around somewhere - maybe it would be interesting to some of the folks here if I could find and post them - let me know). I got the slitted back plate (made of very hard stainless steel) and the block for the tuning screws (aluminum) fabricated at the Physics Department shop at U. C. Riverside, where I was a graduate student at the time in Physiological Psychology and Biochemistry. The springs used to balance the mechanism were defective discards from the place where my Dad worked - they were shutter springs for reconnaissance cameras. How they were defective, I will never know, but they've worked perfectly now for almost 40 years without adjustment.
The rest of the parts were bought or home-made by my Dad, with me providing a very small bit of assistance and a lot of moral support and enthusiasm. He used a diagonal from a screen door to provide adjustment of lever position, built the bell crank by hand (with hand tools), formed, heated, and bent the actuating lever from stainless steel, etc.
The surprising part of all this is that, just as was the case for the springs, the entire mechanism has gone all these years without need for repair, lubrication (thanks in large part to ball bearings and teflon-lined guides), or even adjustment (other than b string tuning).
And, after all these years, I've still never hooked up any strings but the b string to the mechanism, and never explored the flatting side of any of the design. Maybe someday...
Incidentally, the entire mechanism can be seen in photos taken by Jim Sliff (Silverface) and posted on this forum.
Hope that info is useful.
Bob |
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