A sequel to my ‘Telecaster’

[Dave Higham]

So there I was, having finished this guitar,

https://www.projectguitar.com/forums/topic/54223-a-%E2%80%98telecaster%E2%80%99/

with this spare ‘Mighty Mite’ neck I hadn’t used. What to do with it? Well the answer’s obvious. What’s more, stepson had mentioned that grandson was learning to play, so problem solved. I’d seen a Tele that one of the Fender custom shop luthiers, Fred Stuart, had made. He loved the old Martin acoustics , so he’d made one with a spruce top, herringbone binding, tortoise pickguard, mahogany neck, etc., which gave me the idea of what to do with this one.

I decided to make it more of a ‘traditional’ Tele  with a modern Tele bridge, metal control plate and knobs and a pick guard, and one or two personal touches; a spruce top, a forearm contour and binding and a belly cut. I started with a one-piece khaya slab for the body. I hollowed it out in a similar manner to a ‘Thinline’  to counteract the weight of the metal hardware and keep the weight down as much as possible. The cavities are slightly different, because of the forearm contour.

The spruce top will only be about 3mm thick to allow me to bend it for the forearm contour, so I glued in a support at right angles to the line of the bend.

I drew out the profile of the contour and stuck it onto the body, then shaved it down almost to the line and finished off using a large sanding board.

Edited October 26, 2021 by Dave Higham

[ScottR]

Looking forward to another classy ride.

SR

[Dave Higham]

20 hours ago, ScottR said:

Looking forward to another classy ride.

A bit less classy this time.

 

[Dave Higham]

I made a bending form for the top and did a trial run with a spruce off-cut. The form is a peculiar shape as it got modified a couple of times before and after the trial run.

The top being bent. It’s dowelled to the form to stop it moving around. The area to be bent is dampened, the silicone blanket is put in place, the wood and blanket are clamped and the heat is turned on. When it gets up to about 300°F the part under the blanket is gently pushed down onto the form and clamped. The blanket is allowed to cool down and it’s left overnight.

It worked well, with just a little spring-back.

[ScottR]

3 hours ago, Dave Higham said:

A bit less classy this time.

 

Oh, I bet not.

It's your designs, jigs, work aids, thought processes and techniques that make it classy.

SR

[Dave Higham]

I thought 3mm of spruce might be rather fragile so I glued on some cross-grained patches in the hollow areas. Belt and braces really. After all, acoustic instruments are only that thick or less.

Then the top got glued to the body. The old 'forest of clamps' shot.

So far, so good

[Prostheta]

That's what happens when everything is run patiently and by the numbers. I should take more note

[Dave Higham]

I’m afraid I didn’t take blow-by-blow photos this time, so there isn‘t a lot more to show.

Fred bound his in white plastic with a tortoise pickguard. What on earth prompted him to do that? He should have bound it in tortoise to match. Anyway, I happen to have some tortoise binding so I’m going to use that with white/black/white/black purfling on the front (I’m not a fan of herringbone) and a white line on the sides. The forearm contour makes binding a bit tricky, so fingers crossed. After trimming the spruce flush to the mahogany, I cut most of the binding rebate with the router but had to go back to traditional gramil and chisels in the area of the contour.

The tortoise (plastic) binding bends easily horizontally but doesn’t really want to bend vertically, so I forced it into the shape I wanted and applied some heat. Because I was working on other things it also stayed in there for a few days, which might also have helped.

It didn’t keep the shape perfectly and sprang back quite a bit, but I managed to get it to go where I wanted it by forcing it down and gluing it at the centre of the arm contour and working out from there.

[Prostheta]

I have this exact same conundrum with my current build, Dave. I don't have a Gramil, and I'm not entirely convinced about the pathing that the CNC wants to take around that 3D curve with an offset added. I'm tempted to build a binding jig using drawer slides, much how acoustic makers do this work. After all, I have the correct cutter and bearing set. The ABS I'm using appears to be very receptive to acetone - almost as much as celluloid is - so I'm guessing it's a better class of ABS without it having (if I am right in thinking) large amounts of PVC added. I'll use your example here as a guideline.

Purfling pinstripes behind and under tortoise are exceptionally classy. This looks like yet another inspirational build.

[Dave Higham]

1 hour ago, Prostheta said:

I'm tempted to build a binding jig using drawer slides, much how acoustic makers do this work.

I made a binding router  set-up with drawer slides which I've used on other instruments. The problem with this one was that the slope on the arm bevel is such that the router support hits the top before the cutter gets to the lowest point. It would need a very thick 'donut' (the part in contact with the surface) and an extension for the shaft of the router cutter to be able to cut the rebate. Something to think about before making the jig. Hope that made sense.

Edited November 1, 2021 by Dave Higham

[Prostheta]

No, that all makes sense because I was thinking about that issue myself. I'll be using my Makita RP0900C which has a reasonably slight footprint on the fixed base's plate, so I'll possibly be making a replacement from Perspex. It's about 45mm from the centre, however I really need to draw this out. Done correctly, this will be a "keeper" jig rather than a quick one-off.

[Dave Higham]

I bought a standard Tele pickguard and modified it to a Merle Haggard-ish shape. The horn is slightly different and I cut it straight across the bottom. I don’t think Tele pickguards were really meant to provide protection from picks. They were there to cover up the routed slots for the pickup wiring which is why they are cut round the bridge and the control plate but I don’t need to do that. It’s held on by black screws (I prefer them to chrome) which almost disappear.

The bridge, tuners, control plate and knobs are all Gotoh in Cosmo Black.

The finish is Osmo satin Polyx Oil. It’s supposed to be for floors and furniture so it should be reasonably hard-wearing. Spruce doesn’t need pore filling but I decided not to fill the khaya either. The Osmo, after several wipe-on wipe-off coats, half-filled the pores and gave a finish that I quite like.

Thanks for watching.

Dave.

[Bizman62]

29 minutes ago, Dave Higham said:

The finish is Osmo satin Polyx Oil. It’s supposed to be for floors and furniture so it should be reasonably hard-wearing.

I just sanded back the pine floor of our daughters' room after 25 years of Osmo. Agreed, the most hard wearing places had already the finish knocked off and as the wood was slab sawn I had to use quite a lot of glue to reattach the harder splinters to the fast grown soft wood. I did the sanding with a 4" random orbital which could follow the convexity of the 5" wide planks - they were sold as "rustic" with beveled edges so the unevenness is sort of a feature. Not to mention that I had no interest to hire a big machine which I can't really handle (I've tried) for levelling the floor and blowing dust all over the place. The vacuum I used with the orbital kept the room surprisingly clean.

Had the wood been of better quality, more like quarter sawn with tighter growth rings the job would have been even easier.

Anyhow, the point was that Osmo is a pretty good finish for guitars as well as floors. It's not as hard as lacquer but if you get a dent it's fairly easy to fix by steaming, sanding and reapplying. Lacquer would crack and it's hard to blend a spot repair.

[ScottR]

Damn, it didn't take long to get from the binding step to the look at my beautiful new guitar, did it?

And it is indeed very classy looking. Love how the binding and pickguard tie together.

Exquisite work!

SR

[Prostheta]

It's oddly satisfying seeing Spruce used as a guitar top. That silkiness of the texture makes that Tele so much more classy.

[mattharris75]

Wow. Just wow. This might be my favorite tele style guitar I've ever seen...

[Dave Higham]

Thanks for the kind words guys.

I'll have to find something else to post now. I don't have a current project I could post but I have a few previous projects with a lot of photos if that's OK.

[Prostheta]

Without a doubt Dave. So how many guitars in are you now?

[Dave Higham]

Well, not counting the wall hangings I made as a teenager, I made a classic guitar (I'd found a book, that's all there was then) in 1970. That turned out OK so I made a 'dreadnought' in 1971 (that was a dud).

Then life got in the way until I found myself plonking along on a cheap electric bass guitar about 20 years ago and thought 'I could make one of these'. So with the help of Melvin's book (which I still recommend to anyone wanting to make their first- thank you and RIP Melvyn) I made a 5-string neck-through from a reclaimed, broken mahogany chest of drawers. Thanks to Melvyn it turned out well and I plonked along on that until I'd made another one. Yes, I'd got the bug.

Since then, if I remember rightly, it's 4 solid body electric basses, 1 sort of 335 contruction 5-string bass (based on Rick Turner's Renaissance model), an acoustic bass guitar, my version of a MkII Ashbory rubber stringed thing, 2 Ukulele basses, 2 tenor ukuleles (twins), a cuatro, a Nordic mandola !!!, an OM acoustic guitar with all the bells and whistles, the 2 Teles and another OM without any bells or whistles which is almost finished.

So, strictly speaking, the short answer is 5. 1 classic, 2 'acoustics' and two Teles. I make stuff for fun and making the same thing again isn't as much fun for me. I've only made 2 instruments for people who asked me to, and they were friends, and I told them that if I or they weren't happy with the instrument, they didn't have to buy it. Fortunately we were all happy.

I do go on don't I? But you did ask.

[ScottR]

18 hours ago, Dave Higham said:

I have a few previous projects with a lot of photos if that's OK.

Pretty please.

SR

[komodo]

On 11/3/2021 at 11:24 AM, Prostheta said:

It's oddly satisfying seeing Spruce used as a guitar top. That silkiness of the texture makes that Tele so much more classy.

Totally agree. The figured wood habit is a hard one to break, and while it can be stunning less can most definitely be more ( Yngwie).

[ADFinlayson]

7 hours ago, komodo said:

Totally agree. The figured wood habit is a hard one to break, and while it can be stunning less can most definitely be more ( Yngwie).

Less is not more, more is more

[Bizman62]

10 hours ago, ADFinlayson said:

Less is not more, more is more

That translates as such into Finnish as well.

I've quite often been pondering the saying "less is more" and the derivative above. The idea is clear to me, but the wording is confusing. Obviously it's a phrase meant to be contradictory and thus easy to remember - and lead into deeper thoughts:

• How much is much?
• Is "good/plenty enough" sufficient?
• What about "flawless"?
• When does "more" become "too much"?
• When is "less" too little to be praised as "more"?
• What does it take to make a flawless "less" to "more"?

 

[Prostheta]

The well-known quotation of Albert Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" applies here even though this was a quotation-friendly reduction of how Einstein originally said it:

"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience"

"less is more" - I would contend that the stated "more" is not intended as being comparative to "less", simply that "less" is superior to the unstated "more". I agree about the snappy memorableness, even though it sort of undermines the meaning to a degree. Less is objectively not better than more in all cases. Fewer votes are certainly not going to win one a fair election for example. "Simpler is better" carries the same base meaning, however this does not necessarily mean "stupider is better". This just will not hold water, no sir.

[Dave Higham]

Not quite in the same vein, but there's a French expression, 'Le trop (ou le mieux), est l'énémie du bien'. It's attributed to Voltaire and translates into English as 'Perfect is the enemy of good'. In other words, when something you've made is pretty damn good, don't go and ruin it by trying to make it perfect! Something of which I have to confess I have been guilty in the past.

Shakespeare said,

Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?

Confucius said,

"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without."

Watson-Watt, who developed early warning radar in Britain to counter the rapid growth of the Luftwaffe, propounded a "cult of the imperfect", which he stated as "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes."

Just thought you'd like to know. (Thank you Wikipedia)