TT2-10 Building a telecaster style guitar from scratch

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27th February 2010

An Introduction:

This isn't my first guitar build but it is the first I have done commercially. By commercially I don't mean that I am a luthier and I don't advertise to be such but that someone who saw a guitar I built previously asked me to make him a telecaster style guitar with a few differences and so I quoted him a total of £700. He accepted the quote and paid £150 deposit to cover the materials.

The body will be a 2 piece mahogany dyed a dark brown with an emerald green flame maple top. This will have a pearloid binding and scratchplate. The neck will be rock maple and handmade from scratch too. The hardware will be silver.

Onto the differences between this and your average telecaster. The body will be 35mm and not 45mm. This is thin and doesn't leave much room for error with the routing. The flat for the jack socket will be exagerrated as you will see from the pictures. The bridge will have modern style saddles rather than the traditional barrel type. The lower horn will be slightly thinner which means I can't use an off the shelf scratchplate or the screw holes will look wrong. The neck will be thin to the extreme measuring 39mm at the nut. Not to my personal liking but thats not for me to decide.

So onto the build. The first step was to take the 2 pieces of mahogany and glue them together. I had manually sanded them 'flush' and then on went the titebond original. I used strong masking tape to hold them together and left them overnight.

Using a template I drew the basic shape keeping the join in the wood as central as possible. Out came the jigsaw and I roughly cut around the outline.

The maple veneer was trimmed so that both bookmatched pieces fit together nicely. I want a clean crisp join and no little nicks here. Once trimmed they are set side by side and using masking tape they are joined. Titebond is applied to the rear of the veneer and the guitar face and then spread with a paint roller.

Final job was to line up the veneer join to the centre line of the guitar and then weigh it down. You can see I am using some hi-tec equipment for this process. namely a paving slab. This was then left overnight.

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