2011 Cole Clark Fat Lady FL2AC

3 September 2025

This was bought from a guy in Brisbane Australia in late October 2024. I had recently bought another Fat Lady and had been pleasantly surprised by how good it was, despite being almost as ugly as most Cole Clarks are. But this one was highly unusual being all black so that the ugly timbers were covered up.

Prior to 2014, the letter ‘A‘ for active was used instead of ‘E’ for electric in the model numbers. So this model number decodes as Fat Lady (Dreadnought body shape) model 2 with a pickup and a cutaway. Model 1 is the most basic model, model 2 is the medium range and model 3 is more fancy with rather garish paua shell inlays and so on.

Fatlady fingerboard
Block position markers

Fatlady binding

The seller told me that he had bought it brand new, but there were a few mysteries / inconsistencies surrounding this guitar. For one thing the shop told him they had done a fret dress. Why would you do that with a new guitar? Also the seller told me that when he contacted Cole Clark to find out more about it they had told him that this serial number should have been sunburst, not black. In late August 2025 I discovered that to be correct. The rear of the neck had some damage due to a guitar stand so I decided to try to smooth it off because it was annoying. After a bit of sanding I found the varnish / paint on the neck to be quite flaky, to the point where I could scratch it off with my thumb nail. I got carried away and there it was, sunburst paint job underneath the black! Quite a mystery.

Originally this one had the older two way pickup system but it failed pretty much immediately after I bought it. I contacted Cole Clark for advice and they just said, "After this amount of time, the electronics can give out," which is not really a great ad for Cole Clark but that's life. So I bought an upgrade kit from the 2-way system to the latest GP3 for $450 and spent another $250 getting it installed. The guy who did it was an ex employee of Cole Clark.

Fatlady controls
Two way pickup system to blend the piezo (bridge) with the face sensor