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A ‘Telecaster’


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42 minutes ago, Dave Higham said:

I made a template using the neck itself. I don’t know if this is the approved method but it worked for me.

That's a widely used method, although most of the time I've seen it been used is right on the guitar itself! Doing it on a template is much safer as you can change the center line in case the neck wasn't properly aligned.

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At this point I had second thoughts about the Mighty Mite neck. When I ordered it I thought I’d be able to customise it a bit but I realised that what I wanted to do either wasn’t possible or involved so much work it wasn’t worth it.  So I decided to make one.

Even so, I ordered a slotted fingerboard which I could customise and that might also save me having to buy a 12” radius sanding block, etc.

I already had just about everything else I needed.

 

One of the things I wanted to do was veneer the headstock to match the body; difficult, if not impossible with a ready-made Tele neck as I wanted the veneer to go under the fingerboard. There are some large off-cuts of the drop-top so I used a piece to make headstock veneers. Cut two pieces of dyed black veneer and re-sawed an off-cut into two veneers for front and back of headstock and sanded them to 1.5mm  thick. Also made a template for the headstock. That brown thing behind them is the neck blank.

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Just a word about templates. The quality of MDF sold by the DIY stores here goes down year by year. I still have some old pieces that had a very smooth, fine-grained surface and quite a dense core. It wasn’t HDF, it was MDF. The crap they sell now would need the surface sanding if you wanted to paint it and the edge is easily deformed by pressure from the bearing on the router cutter. So I soak the edges of MDF templates with water-thin CA; hence the stains you can see on the surface. It hardens them up nicely.

Glued two pieces together for the back veneers.

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Skimmed the equivalent of the veneer thickness off the end of the neck blank and made a clamping caul. Drilled two holes in areas that will be cut off later and placed two headless panel pins in the holes. The veneer and caul have corresponding holes so it won’t all go sliding about when it’s glued and clamped.

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Forgot to take a photo of it glued, but as the veneer was oversize I skimmed it flush on the router table.

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Positioned the template on the neck blank and drilled holes at the tuner positions. The holes are only 5mm diameter and they’ll be opened up to 10mm later, but, for the moment, I can use them with 5mm dowel pins to locate the template. Take it off, put it back on, front or back, etc.

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Routing  the slot for the truss rod on my ultra-sophisticated router table. The fence rotates on a 5mm dowel pin (the black dot at the left-hand end) and fine adjustments are made by tapping the right-hand end with a hammer. The ‘stops’ which determine the length of the slot are fixed with double sided tape.

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Et voila! Once I’d cut the slot to depth I had to widen it slightly as my router cutter is 6mm diameter and the truss rod is 6.35mm wide for some strange reason.

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9 hours ago, Dave Higham said:

So I soak the edges of MDF templates with water-thin CA; hence the stains you can see on the surface. It hardens them up nicely.

I've been doing this too. MDF has always been a "cardboard" material in my eyes, but lately I've been soaking with superglue right before final shaping of my templates, taking advantage of the the fact that it soaks liquid up like a sponge.

 

Really, and I mean this, really nice build so far. 

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I fitted the truss rod, glued in a fillet on top of it, skimmed the fillet flush with the surface of the board and completely forgot about taking any photos. Sorry.

 

Trimmed some of the thickness off the headstock on the bandsaw and finished off on the spindle sander. I’ve added a fence to the spindle sander. It’s hardly any more sophisticated than the router table, in fact it’s a bit off the end of the router table.

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I now need to bend the veneer for the front. The boiling water and clamp method worked OK for the body binding so I decided to try it for the headstock veneer. The lower caul was shaped in exactly the same way as the headstock in the previous photo, and the upper one with the radius 2 mm smaller to allow for the thickness of the veneers.

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It worked. I just dipped the part to be bent in a pan of boiling water for a few minutes and then clamped the veneers between the cauls and put it in a low oven for about an hour.

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Your spindle sander looks like it's the same Triton-branded model that I have. I should really make that modification as well as it's far better than clamping bits of wood every time. Very thorough process on the headstock facing veneer bending also. Does the oven-warming do anything specific other than drive off residual moisture?

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19 minutes ago, Prostheta said:

Your spindle sander looks like it's the same Triton-branded model that I have. Does the oven-warming do anything specific other than drive off residual moisture?

Yes, it's the Triton (other brands are available ;) ). I have a feeling that the quicker it dries out, the better it keeps its shape, but that may not be true. At any rate it means I can use it more or less straight away.

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Your thinking seems sound. My understanding is that heat causes lignin to loosen, allowing the cellulose/hemicellulose structures to slip. Water just stops wood from scorching by reducing localised temperatures. Normally with bending wood against an iron, higher temperatures than the maximum 100C of water are used so I'm unsure how to rationalise this since it's a "low" temperature bend. Clearly, it works. That's the result. It might just be that it works for simpler forming such as this, but more complex and demanding bends - those that require a form to be maintained without much retention - may need forming at higher temps to increase permanence.

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I needed to inlay the head veneer before it was glued to the head

I cut the recess for the shell on a little home-made copying rig. This was thought up by Keith Mackenzie and can be seen on Chris Paulick’s YouTube channel.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PQlDAg971c

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Photo from another instrument.

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I used the upper caul I made for bending the veneers to clamp them while gluing them to the head and here’s the result.

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The overlapping veneer was carefully shaved down flush with the surface of the neck.

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The pantograph and the plastic mould are a clever way to do the carving for the inlay. More than that, your logo looks complicated while it in reality is very router friendly! Am I right to assume that you can do it with a 3 mm bit?

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That's an absolutely excellent way of producing a 1:1 copy of an inlay! Is that some kind of 2-part epoxy putty or maybe an oven-bake polymer? I made a reduction pantograph that works in both 2:1 and 3:1 but obviously relies on having templates made to that size for reduction in both positive and negative. I found that the runout in a Dremel is very high, making sub-millimetre detail work far "less sub-millimetre", so what you gain in precision and detail from the reduction pantograph can easily be lost in runout.

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Your spindle-sander thicknessing setup made me think about how I want to go about improving how I do it also. Drilling the plate is a good first step, and similar to your drawer slides for the copy router, I was thinking of making a sliding plate so that the face of the headstock can be affixed. I've had minor handling blips which have impressed themselves into the rear sanding face that are driving me to improve on how this is done.

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20 hours ago, Prostheta said:

 Is that some kind of 2-part epoxy putty or maybe an oven-bake polymer?

Your spindle-sander thicknessing setup made me think about how I want to go about improving how I do it also. Drilling the plate is a good first step, and similar to your drawer slides for the copy router, I was thinking of making a sliding plate so that the face of the headstock can be affixed.

The impression of the inlay shell is made with 'Friendly plastic'. A very low melting poiny polymer which softens in hot water.

https://www.amazon.com/friendly-plastic/s?k=friendly+plastic

The modification to the spindle sander is quite basic as you can see.

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Ah, pretty much like Sugru then. Excellent that it can be reused!

That was pretty much what I have in mind also, however a stepped (for any fingerboard that might be on there) sliding platen on the face should allow me to DST the headstock face on, reducing the tendency for the headstock to "fall into" the path of the sander. It gets a bit tight for room to work at best, and this might also help keep my fingers away from the business end.

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4 hours ago, Dave Higham said:

The grain of the maple veneers is so squirrely that it chips out very easily

I just had to check the word "squirrely" because it made me think about squirrels which obviously wasn't what you meant. So it appears to also mean "unpredictable" which makes totally sense! A new word learned, not a bad day! 😁

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I bought a radiused and slotted fingerboard to save myself some time. The first thing to do was to take the corners off the fret slots using a triangular section  needle file. I later found out (too late) that I should have also checked the slots with my fret slotting saw. I tried to press them in on the drill press and they weren’t having it. I didn’t want to risk breaking the table on the drill press (I’ve heard of it happening) so I hammered them in and, I mean, really hammered!

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I’ve already realised that I shouldn’t have routed the neck pocket in the body to suit the ready-made neck, as making a neck to match the pocket is a bit trickier, especially as I want to bind the fingerboard. The neck pocket has a ¼” radius in the corners and I don’t want to try to put a ¼” radius on a bound FB. So the FB will have 22 frets and will overhang the end of the neck, which I’ll endeavour to make fit the pocket as best I can

So I made up some binding strips from rosewood and sycamore veneer to finish at 3 mm thick and after some careful measuring cut the FB to its finished width minus 6 mm.

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Once the FB was bound I sanded the width a little, until it measured exactly the same as the pocket in the body. Once it’s glued onto the neck blank, I’ll trim the neck to the width of the FB on the router table. With any luck the neck should then fit the pocket. So now I nailed the FB to the neck. Well, not really. They are 1.5 mm panel pins used to locate the FB in holes drilled in the fret slots.

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Now I can blend the end of the FB into the headstock on the spindle sander.

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And it came out like this. I had to take the truss rod cover off to do this, so I filled it with a piece of balsa wood to stop the hole getting full of sanding dust. I fill as many of the holes as possible before pore filling and varnishing as it makes the job much easier. I use balsa as it crushes easily and can be a bit oversize and be forced into the hole to make a perfect fit. It’s also easily sanded flush with the surface and easy to dig out after finishing.

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I trimmed most of the surplus off the neck on the band saw and routed it flush with the FB.

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The FB isn’t glued on yet, as there are one or two things still to do which are easier without it. The first is to sand a radius on the end to fit the neck pocket. It’s not quite as good a fit as the ready-made neck was (it slides in easier) but I think it will do. It will be mostly hidden by the fingerboard overhang anyway.

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I’ve never liked the idea of using woodscrews to attach a neck to a body. I’ve always used threaded inserts and machine screws on basses and I’ll do the same here. So this is the second thing that’s easier without the fingerboard. With the neck in place I mark the position of the holes.

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With the inserts installed I wick two or three drops of thin CA around them.

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Some people have trouble fitting threaded inserts. I do it, using a drill press. If anyone who has a drill press is interested I’ll show how I do it. Or perhaps there’s somewhere else on the forum for that.

 

 

Edited by Dave Higham
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I think it might have been mentioned a few times before, but those gems often get buried with time. Incidentally, I have always been under the impression that those slots go face down as "chipbreakers" of sorts. Not that I think this makes much of a difference. Any idea?

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3 hours ago, Dave Higham said:

So the FB will have 22 frets and will overhang the end of the neck,

What, isn't that common practice? Over half of my factory built guitars have the overhang.

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It is common practice now, yes. Back when Leo Fender was perfecting the Tele and Strat designs, the fingerboard was flush with the neck at the heel end. It makes sense for solid Maple necks with truss rods inserted through the back. I think that when you share ideas on some forums populated by a high fraction of purists and vintage cork sniffers, you develop a defensive posture for justifying even the most basic of decisions that differ from their expectations. I can't say whether this is the case here, however I've certainly fallen foul of this in the past.

Have I missed anything, or is the truss rod off-centre at the heel end?

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5 hours ago, Prostheta said:

I have always been under the impression that those slots go face down as "chipbreakers" of sorts.

It make sense , but in that case, you can't get them out again. Some manufacturers also make a tool for inserting them, which locates in the slot.

https://www.rockler.com/power-drive-threaded-insert-tool-power-drive-threaded-insert-tool

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2 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

What, isn't that common practice? Over half of my factory built guitars have the overhang.

As I said, not knowing much about Teles when I started, I ordered a Mighty Mite neck (which I didn't use in the end) and it had 21 frets and the FB flush with the end of the neck like the original Teles. As I wanted to bind the FB, the 1/4" rad. was a nuisance so I added the 22nd fret and let it overhang. I then found out that Fender does this too.

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