Walnut/Cherry Telecaster

First, a view of the finished guitar - a pretty much successful first project, with some lessons learned. The guitar plays & sounds great! One measure of success was that my son informed me that I was going to build his next guitar:



I've been interesting in building an electric guitar for a while & decided to try during my holiday break. I had some 3/4" thick walnut which has been lying around the basement for quite a while. It seemed appropriate to try to use this as the start of a body. It wasn't wide enough, but edge gluing two pieces would take care of that. A 2nd layer below would handle thickness (almost). I found a nice piece of Cherry at a local lumberyard - and a 1/4" thick piece of poplar (contrasting wood color). These three layers would make up the required thickness (I know that multi-piece bodies aren't thought well of - but for a 1st time effort - and minimal expense ($15 at this point), it seemed worth a try).

Using a jointer, I cleaned up one edge of the walnut & glued two widths together to get the right width for a body. After cleaning up the board & doing some planing & beltsanding to get things somewhat flat, I cut out the pickup & control cavities (using forstner bits and a router). Since I hadn't bought any parts yet (didn't want to spend more $$ until I could tell if the body would work) - I used a plan for a telecaster that I found on the net & guesstimated the PU routs (can always enlarge later if needed):



One advantage of doing things in layers is that you can route a wiring channel - without having to resort to long drill bits (I have to learn to drink coffee before doing things in the morn):



Gluing the layers was successful (no apparent gaps & the body didn't warp), so I tried cutting part of the body shape with my bandsaw. I have a benchtop bandsaw - taking it slow & careful, I had no problems cutting around the outline of the bottom part of the body. I decided to stop there, as it would be easier to do the neck pocket route before shaping the rest of the body.



Now that I've gotten this far successfully, it's time to buy some parts - I want to have the neck and bridge on hand before shaping the neck pocket.

I plan on deviating from a normal tele - make a pickguard & control cover out of wood, as well as using mini-switches instead of the single 3 way (maybe try to do some PU phasing?)...

Neck finally arrived (ordered from Carvin - their necks are wonderful). Learned one important thing - next time, get the neck first - all critical measurements come from it. I had to extend the routs for the pickups to get them in the right places, but everything appears to have worked out OK.

Somehow, I managed to get the neck pocket just right & then worked out the rest from there. One weekends work resulted in the following:





I made the control cover from Maple (tried purpleheart first, but it snapped along the grain - Maple is much tougher). The neck pickup is held in place with a cover plate made out of Maple as well (the only exposed metal will be the strings, bridge & tuners). All holes are drilled (everything test fit OK!) - all that's left is to sand and sand and sand, finish and assemble.

The finished guitar:







There were a few minor problems - primarily, I'd routed the PU holes too close to the neck (really should have bought the neck first & measured from it) - the bridge ended up a little too close (I had to cover the hole I'd routed), so the intonation is slightly off. My original intent was to use the third switch for series/parallel selection - the 1st time around, something was wrong & I got lots of noise in the series setting, so I simply went back to conventional wiring.

I put a lot of effort into shielding & used star grounding instead of the conventional soldering to the pot bodies - end result is that even with single coil pickups, the guitar is very quiet.

BTW: This is my workshop: