Seethrough blonde tele build

[ADFinlayson]

Here's one for Mike. I've had a couple of nice Fenders in for setups lately. A blonde custom shop strat from 2012, came looking new but has seen some use.

and this, I'm told is a Chris fleming 55 relic tele. It belongs to the chap that winds my pickups and he's been after a similar build with 1 pickup and a rosewood board. So I took this one to pieces and took all the dimensions I could. The body shape is actually quite different to my G&W tele templates!

So I started with this bit of swampash from Stewmac

once rough shaped got it down to 7 15oz and I did warn him it might be a bit heavier than his CF tele

I still had 3mm of thickness tot take off and all the routes to do, which resulted in getting it down to 4 7oz which felt like a nice weight.

Skip forward a few steps because I forgot to take photos and we have a swampash body moderately figured birdeye from a blank I got on the cheap a few years ago, and an indian rosewood board

He was complaining about high action or unplayable buzz and choking out on his CF tele - I improved it a lot with some spot levelling but the 7.25" radius is always going to be hampering lead work IMO, so we went for a 12" radius on the neck. 

I didn't route this body to the template. I drew around the existing tele to get the shape as close as possible. Aged parts going from this, tuners and gotoh intune bridge from stewmac and the rest are all ages parts from Charles Guitars

You may notice the fretboard is a bit thicker than what you would expect to see. he wanted just SS frets in it so I decided to keep the board a bit thicker than I see on most fenders, although I wasn't actually able to tell from these custom shop examples because they were both one-piece necks. Also. getting the rosewood dust out of the maple on the neck is a real PITA!

Getting on to finalising everything. A lot of people say that when you're starting out building, the tele is the easiest design to start with. But I think these have maintained the world record for the most awkward 6 holes that any man has had to drill since the 1950s. 

I'm using the fender style flush fit ferrules so no tearout is acceptable.

Also first time using this kind of jack plate. I thought it would be a nightmare and I'd have to go out and buy a specific size forstner for a one-off hole but happy days, 22mm bit fit nicely.

On to finishing. I'm using Northwest guitars nitrocellulose because that is the only place I could find a suitable white. I doubt this stuff is compatible with the Morrels pre-cat cellulose that I normally use so I also got a tin of their clear gloss which is a 250ml tin which they claim is enough for 4 tele bodies and they recommend thinning 50/50. Both points are complete horseshit. After colour and 6 coats of clear on top of it. I did a light sand with 600 and went through it in seconds.

So I had to sand the back off and do it again. Not a bad thing because in hindsight, it was just a bit too transparent. This is where it's at now.

the 250ml tin that can cover 4 guitars is now empty... Fortunately a friend of mine that uses NW guitar lacquer said he only uses their colours and uses Dartfords lacquer which is compatible and available in 1L and 5L tins, and he's convinced it's the same lacquer but rebranded for NW Guitars. The larger quantity means it's significantly cheaper too which is good because £10 for 250ml is not cool.

It's now had 3 coats of 70/30 lacquer/thinner on top of the colour and it's building up a nice gloss so I'm much happier with it. Now I need to crack on and get my logo inlayed in the headstock and get some lacquer in the neck.

 

[Bizman62]

35 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

The body shape is actually quite different to my G&W tele templates!

Yet another example of the old guitars (or their remakes) were/are individuals - despite templates they most likely didn't want to dump a perfect piece of wood just because there's a deep scratch or hidden knot, they just reshaped the body in the fly. Something that the purists should remember when asking for exact measurements of original guitars!

[ADFinlayson]

35 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

Yet another example of the old guitars (or their remakes) were/are individuals - despite templates they most likely didn't want to dump a perfect piece of wood just because there's a deep scratch or hidden knot, they just reshaped the body in the fly. Something that the purists should remember when asking for exact measurements of original guitars!

That is quite possible, but the other pissabolity is that G&W changed the shape to avoid copyright. I don't have enough experience with Telecasters to prove either theory

[Bizman62]

3 hours ago, ADFinlayson said:

pissabolity

That's a hilarious word! Intentional or not, but somehow it instantly made me think of hypocritical companies telling their white isn't white because they added a spoonful of soot into a tub of milk.

[Bizman62]

Adding to that, if it looks like a Telecaster, sounds like a Telecaster and feels like a Telecaster, who cares if the dimensions are off by a millimetre or three? Fools won't notice and the wise ones won't tell.

[ADFinlayson]

I like a bit of inlay work, but there is nothing enjoyable about inlaying ebony into maple! Hopefully a bit of amber might help to mask the filler a bit, but I doubt it.

That is the smallest version of my logo I've attempted to inlay, anything bigger looked silly on this headstock, in fact I don't think my logo suits tele headstocks at all. Annoyingly the one place it does seem to work nicely is exactly where the string tree needs to go. 

This is the second logo too because the first one broke so many times that I think it would actually be categorised as a chemical product.

[ADFinlayson]

Forgot to add the video of me spraying it

 

[komodo]

Any tips for inlaying into maple? At some point, I'll be putting something into the roasted pieces I have and am acutely aware that I won't have the ebony/CA fill trick to fall back on.

[Bizman62]

I was going to say something along the basic lines but after noticing who was asking...

[ADFinlayson]

3 minutes ago, komodo said:

Any tips for inlaying into maple? At some point, I'll be putting something into the roasted pieces I have and am acutely aware that I won't have the ebony/CA fill trick to fall back on.

Yeah, the ebony dust + CA trick is the bedrock of my guitar building ability. I spent a good hour cutting out that inlay piece, even with the dremel. Checking and rescoring with a scalpel regularly and used a super fine router bit in the corners - I don't think I could get it any more precise with a modelling chisel either. 

I did have some bigger than usual gaps around the inlay. This is by far the smallest version of my logo I've done so it was awkward to cut out and inlay, I used some dust from this neck blank mixed with the some titebond to make filler. I mixed it really dry so there isn't much glue in it which got the colour really close to the neck wood. 

Here's how it's looking at the moment. I've done some levelling on the body, I had a bit of blush too which I hopefully sanded out. It's really wet in England at the mo, I'm managing to keep the shop to 50% humidity with the dehumidifier on 24/7. Trouble is as soon as I switch the booth extraction on, all that dry air is sucked out of the shop, fresh air comes in from outside and it get's up to 60% in not a lot of time.

So I'm waiting on some anti-bloom thinners before I spray anymore on the body.

I made up some shader for the neck with some yellow, a dash of brown and a dash of pink and sprayed it on conservatively, and it's had a couple of coats of clear over the top.

Lastly, once I had a few coats of clear over the white, I decided to tap in the ferrules which was a total swine to do, these are the flush fit ones and there isn't any overlap to hide any chip out, I did have to touch up a couple of areas with some white lacquer on a cocktail stick to hide tiny imperfects after knocking them in. I did this so that I could spray over them and re protect the area after knocking them in with the lacquer remelting. I think infuture it would be easier to just install them before finishing and try to tape them off. I did do a bit of research but never found out how Fender do it.

[Bizman62]

1 hour ago, ADFinlayson said:

I think infuture it would be easier to just install them before finishing and try to tape them off.

Ear plugs work quite well in preventing the finish clog round holes.

[komodo]

The Blush Eraser from Behlen works like magic if you can get that there. You just spray a little, and it disappears.

[Crusader]

You're getting me all fired up, loving that piece of Ash. My Tele build has stagnated for too long and I gotta get back into it

By the way I had never used one of them jacks before either and a 22mm bit was the go

[ADFinlayson]

On 10/13/2022 at 4:58 PM, Crusader said:

You're getting me all fired up, loving that piece of Ash. My Tele build has stagnated for too long and I gotta get back into it

By the way I had never used one of them jacks before either and a 22mm bit was the go

Well this comment has served well to remind me to actually update this thread. We're rockin!

My usual approach to polishing now is to use the stewmac medium (brown) hard compound on my buffer after wet sanding, then I use Chemical Guys 36 then 38 polishes on separate mops, but it just didn't look right being all shiny with aged hardware, so I went back down to chemical guys 34 which seems to give a slightly finer polish than the Stewnac medium.

I do like this aged hardware, the bridge is the aged Gotoh "in tune", the tuners the aged Stewmac set and the rest of the hardware came from Charles Guitars in the UK. The only trouble IMO is that the screws that came with the Charles hardware are too aged, they're pretty much covered in rust. The screws on the guard in the above pic are new nickel screws which don't look right so I lightly sanded the top of them and left them in a tub of salt and malt vinegar for a few hours which worked quite nicely, I'll get some pics of that when I'm in the shop later.

Essentially I am trying to make it look aged without making it look relic.

He wanted it to be an Esquire but said he didn't want the switch so I've just wired it up like a Junior with 250k pots.