New G&L Facebook page - CLF RESEARCH CO.

Inside Leo’s lab is this box from CTS Corporation, which I imagine once held sample pots received,
as noted by George Fullerton, on March 1, 1982. It’s just an empty box, but little old things like this are special to me.

Leo’s lounge expansion is happening

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Leo Fender’s concept schematic for a guitar that would have the new split coil MFD guitar pickups,
which would become known as the G&L Z-coil pickups. These pickups were introduced with the new Comanche guitar in 1988.

On the third pic, you can see Leo’s complete Z-coil pickup and some of his other MFD split coil prototypes.

The last pic is of the CLF Research prototype of 1968, and by then Leo was really into using split coil pickups on guitars.
Though he didn’t make them stick in the ‘70s, he ended the ‘80s with some great ones in the Comanche’s Z-coil pickups.

Fake Broadcaster alert! Well, not yet but I just realized these two are here. They were in different parts of the 2548 building
and I didn’t notice until literally 10 minutes ago when I moved some things.

This Broadcaster neck was rejected in 1986, but it was never strung up so maybe it was a cosmetic blem. Hard to tell now as it was
knocked around over 32 years. I have some old bits I can build it with, maybe hand wind some pickups on Leo’s winder.

As if I needed another project instrument right now but yeah, the ancient artifacts have spoken and the ritual must begin before
the harvest moon does, like, whatever and this doesn’t happen. Gon make me a Broadcaster just like Carl Perkins ripped up. Yeeeeeeah!

Project El Toro has been using the neck from our red ‘83 SB-2 for too long. Well, it’s time to put that neck back where it belongs,
‘cause we’re gonna build a brand new neck for Project El Toro.

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...and the old SB-2 is back in action. I really missed it!

Aye!!! Here I was having fun thumping hard on our friend Tony Hill’s ‘81 L-2000 when the amp rack fell off and crashed face down on the carpet.
Scared the living crap out of me. I guess the cab was jumping! Anyway, a few rack screws popped but our trusty BBE B-MAX T and QSC rig still works great.

I just picked out this killer Indian rosewood board for project El Toro. Just look at that smooth, chocolatey mojo. I want to eat this thing!
Reminds me of a Cadbury’s Flake chocolate bar, a U.K. thing since forever and they’re awesome.

We didn’t do quartersawn maple necks back in 1985 but...what the hell. This piece caught my eye and I’ve chosen it for Project El Toro.

I felt like plugging in this 1975 CLF prototype to give its preamp a little exercise and next thing I know
I was frickin’ slamming some volts through its system.

I just started noodling, you know, contemplating how this proto looks sort of like a super P-bass, which of course
my brain shortened to Super-P and that reminded me of Super Freak by Rick James. Damn great track. That made me
think of Freak-A-Zoid by Midnight Star and how much I loved the electro funk bass lines, synths or not.

Anyway, as I’m contemplating all this my hands started providing the sound track for the hamster wheel in my head.
It’s kinda weird, but musicians understand, am I right?

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Manny got the neck wood prepped for Project El Toro and we’ll route the truss rod channel next. I put Project El Toro in Leo’s office to wait for its new neck.

Javier used a Haas VF-4 CNC to mill the slots for the twin reinforcement rods and two-way truss rod. Yes, I geek out on mill work and sound like Randy Marsh with creme fraise.
My wife always calls me Randy Marsh so...

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Project El Toro’s neck is ready to mill.

And now, story time!

When the Fender factory in Fullerton closed and all the equipment and stuff was auctioned off in 1985, CLFR picked up some great deals.
Check out this 1960s cart made in the typical Ronnie Beers style, later painted with a CBS Equipment Identification.

My brother Johnny was there at the auction, still working for Fender at the time, and Dale Hyatt was standing right next to him. Johnny said
something like “Oh, hi Mr. Hyatt, are you here to buy something?” and Dale replied “Nope, I just wanted to see what’s left.”

Yeah, that and score some deals like these carts, instrument buggies, who knows what. See, a lot of the Leo-ish guitar stuff was perfect
for this place, and some was exactly the same as we had here, just a little older.

In the late ‘60s Fender R&D would send parts to CLF Research for Leo to work on. Leo gave instructions like which basic model, routed like this or that.

This Mustang-like body has no bridge route, as it would likely have been used for Leo’s intensive period of bridge development.

Javier measured the neck pocket of Project El Toro’s 1984 body and got started milling the new neck.
I got so excited that I left the woodshop and went up in the polish department loft to consider another decades old relic to bring to life.

That’s when that CBS/Fender Mustang-like prototype caught my eye. Damn distractions are everywhere in this place!!! ; )

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That probably is a Duo Sonic or Musicmaster body - bridges just screwed in with no routing.

Got mah dots

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Dave posted this live about 2 hours ago:

Dave McLaren (me) and Spencer Brown in Leo’s lab. So I got an idea....

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Check it out and post your comments here or on the G&L CLF Research Facebook page.

Hate to be 'that guy' again - But that's a Coronado neck (Code 10 ) not an acoustic neck. Besides the code showing it, the heel of a Fender bolt-on Acoustic neck is curved to match the sound hole.

Wow though - Playing 'Where's Waldo' Leo Fender version with some of those shots.

Story time! Plus parts update for Project Clarence Leo Future.

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I’m holding Leo’s 1966 photo of his drafting table and chair after moving from CBS/Fender to his new CLF Research building on Elm Street in Fullerton.

In the background are the same drafting table and stool, here in the CLF Research factory at 2548 Fender Avenue, where they have been since 1975.

Really cool - unless those pickups are a specific low-impedance creation, they appear to be regular Electric XII pickups. Looking forward to the result.

Curious about the Antigua finish G&L neck in the below pic now too.

I did a little sanding on the neck for Project El Toro, just so I feel like I got some legit sawdust on me with this thing.
Then I went to get Marco, a real pro, to take it the rest of the way to heaven.

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Marco test fitting Project El Toro’s new neck to the original 1984 body.

I’m in the lab and about to do some work on Project Clarence Leo Future. First things first: I had to get those ancient strings off. I am keeping them though.

My bro Johnny McLaren is geeking out on the pickups in Project Clarence Leo Future. Good thing the spare coil we found
has about the same impedance as the coils on the prototype. The orientation of the magnets on the spare coil needed to be reversed
so Norma took care of that on the magnetizer.

Johnny is on fire!

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Memo is carefully soldering in the spare bobbin.

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The preamp awakens!! One pickup coil doesn’t work so immediately Memo and Johnny are all over it.
I’m just stoked the preamp works, so we made some good progress today on Project Clarence Leo Future.

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I love this. Memo is almost done soldering in a mini-toggle switch to substitute for one of the prototype switches (temporarily) that is destroyed.

I said let’s put the neck on it then I remembered I need to find tuners. Spencer and I start looking around the lab, then Tim walks in and says
“I heard you were lookin’ for some Kluson tuners.” Right on, man, right on.

Memo and Spencer have been battling some electrical ghosts in this complicated machine and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen tonight.
Bummer, I know. I was completely psyched to go jam on this in Leo’s Lounge. Hopefully we’ll have it sorted out on Monday.

Still been a really good day for Project Clarence Leo Future. And come to think of it, Project El Toro had a good day as well.

Argh!! The micro tilt machine screw was slightly too long, so I went to the lab and got another prototype Fender 3-bolt plate and we stacked them. Well, it works so...

Leo’s 1967/68 prototype is working! I’m really looking forward to getting to know it tone secrets hidden for half a century. Man, this is so awesome I love it.

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People on Insta asked for fuzz. Not what I had in mind, but what the hell, let’s do a little taster!

Got a BBE Windowpane fuzz into the Marshall JCM-800 Will post pics of settings. I think that out-of-phase position is kinda rad with the fuzz. What do you think?

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On that fuzz clip I have the Windowpane on a moderate fuzz level with the volume kicking a few dB more juice than dry. On the Marshall build,
NORMAL is gain and HI TREBLE is volume. Pretty sure the rest is labeled properly.

I was just tripping with Leo’s CLF-67/68 proto to see where it takes me. Check out this contrast: starts with neck+bridge in phase, then neck+bridge out of phase.
Got a BBE OptiComp for a bit of compression and a BBE Soul Vibe for some rotary swirl.

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So the controls are pretty much traditional with the phase switcher - Pre-amp is always on? Sounds pretty lush.

Project El Toro’s neck is ready for paint and feels amazing. I decided to laser in a current style serial number because this will be a newly completed instrument.
There’s no serial on the bridge plate, in case you were wondering. The neck plate will be black crinkle too.

Project Clarence Leo Future is temporarily using a mini toggle for phase reversal of the neck pickup.
Back in ‘68 Leo used this Arrow H&H USA power switch, probably because that’s what was handy at the time.
I didn’t do a major dive to find a matching Arrow switch around here, and it took only like 5 minutes to get the
right vintage one on eBay.

Project El Toro’s neck is looking sweet after Malcolm sprayed it with a thin urethane finish. He expects that on Thursday he’ll paint the black headstock face
and try to apply the old decal, which may fall apart after 33 years or whatever it’s been.

Ship it! ; )

Project El Toro has its headstock painted black and original decal applied. I tell you, Malcolm worked his magic on this.
He’s been here since like ‘93 but this decal has been here since like ‘85. It takes a real pro to massage a beaten up old decal
to come out this sweet. Thanks, man!

eBay came through with the old Arrow H&H power switch we need to get Project Clarence Leo Future back to the past.
Step 1: swap over the jumper wires from the broken switch to the eBay find.

Our old friend and G&L alum, Ed Sebest, is in town and came to hang. So naturally I put him to work, I mean, gave him the honor of working on
Project Clarence Leo Future. Things got a little hectic with a tiny jumper ground so my brother Johnny jumped in to help.
I am so stoked about an old switch I can’t believe it. : )

...and it’s in! Project Clarence Leo Future looks and sounds like it’s supposed to.

In the early 1980s Leo wound this G&L F-100 MFD test humbucker to be used as series/single/parallel as Johnny and I have done with the V12 pickups. The original F-100 of 1980 was a technologically advanced guitar and influenced our development of the Doheny V12. Today I’ll post about how we came up with the Doheny V12 concept, what we took inspiration from, maybe what we avoided, who knows. I’m going freestyle here and hope it’s interesting. : )

Johnny just messaged me some pics he took when he made the first prototype V12 pickups. He started with a blank JM cover and designed around that. It’s a pretty good size cover, so we knew we had a lot of space to engineer the new MFD coils. Disregard those specs on the tape, those early prototypes are nothing like the final pickups. They were horrible, a full-on Chainsaw Massacre. But it was a starting point, and we wanted to start on the hot side of town and dial back. Gotta jump in somewhere.

When the Doheny came out last year, the tones blew people away. We really pushed ourselves but honestly I feel like we got a little lucky, because those Doheny single coils are wonderful and nothing in the world sounds quite like them. “Make them humbuckers!” we heard. Yeah, well it doesn’t work like that. The first few sets of MFD humbuckers were so disappointing I didn’t even look at the development mules for weeks. Ain’t easy following up an act like those Doheny MFD single coils, so I decided this needs a fresh approach. What might Leo do?

I realized we had to stop thinking about “humbuckers” and start thinking like Leo. With decades of hindsight we can solve puzzles that remained incomplete. Soon inspiration found us in Leo’s prototype MFD humbucker housed in the wider (neck to bridge) cover used for the 1976 Music Man Stingray guitar which was the first production guitar made here at CLFR on Fender Avenue. Aside from those rounded ears, the width (neck to bridge) is the same as a JM cover. And both of those are wider than the ‘78 Sabre guitar and ‘80 F-100 guitar, which are the same except for the ear style. So we thought about how we could take what Leo started and make it really shine. It became a mission.

Here is a ‘76 Stingray guitar cover with a V12 JM cover. Note the width (neck to bridge) is the same. The extra length (side to side) on the JM cover was absolutely necessary for the MFD single coil, but not needed for the humbucker coils. So here’s the deal. The JM cover would give us the space to complete Leo’s work from 40 years ago. People asked for a Doheny with humbuckers, and we sensed this could be epic.

...and you can see the covers on the ‘78 Sabre and ‘80 F-100 are the same except for the ear style. We wanted more width to create wider magnetic fields. I wanted to get massive chunk, and from the start I said we would not do this humbucker Doheny if it didn’t make the Marshall bleed and cone surrounds fray. Plus, big space meant we could better engineer the pickups to work well in series, single and parallel.

I want to make another preamp for Project Clarence Leo Future so we can build a similar guitar to experiment with.
Here’s Memo shopping in Leo’s lab for old resistors, capacitors and stuff.

Check out a Doheny V12 MFD coil (2 per pickup) versus the Doheny MFD single coil. The V12 coil has longer pole pieces and wider aperture, which changes how the winds stack up and therefore the tone. So we got to play with those parameters as well as wire gauge, number of turns, magnets...all that fun stuff.