I'm not keeping the Harley Benton neck, just the body. The body seems to be the best way of getting an Ash Tele body with the correct thickness (Squier Affinity Teles are thinner) and in the appropriate blonde finish.
The neck is from my 2013(ish) MIM Strat. The neck is very comfy, and I've leveled and polished the frets (they needed it!). The Strat itself was a weirdly dead sounding guitar. I was absolutely taken with it for the first week I owned it, in part because it made all the correct Strat noises. At the end of that week I realised the pickups were pretty lifeless; though the bridge pickup was tolerable. Strats just don't seem to ring like a Tele does. I can hit my Tele as hard as I want and it still bounces back. Everything you throw at it comes back as playing dynamics, whereas I find Strats a bit more idiosyncratic and wiry, which translates into what I feel with my hands somehow.
I appreciate that the instrument I build won't have any value. To me, hopefully, it will have supreme value! The thing I love about Teles is that with the tone wide open it is pure Tele,but with the tone rolled back to 8 it starts to get muscly and Les Paul-like. I'm hoping that the humbuckers give it a slightly warmer, muscly edge, and a warmer jazzy edge to the neck pickup. I'm 100% certain that an HH Tele is my perfect guitar, as it has the attack of a Tele with the warmth of a Gibson, less the ice-pick edge of a single coil Tele or the mud of a Gibson.
I might add some photos to this thread if I can actually do quality work. My first trick will be to build humbucker router templates....
Fender Japan and Greco have all built Telegib replicas. For clarity, Seymour Duncan built a couple. The one for Jeff Beck has the double-cream bridge humbucker, grey pickguard and chopped Fender bridge. Seymour traded this for Jeff Beck's Yardbirds Esquire, though depending on who is being asked the trade was more or less begrudging on Beck's part. Seymour Duncan then built himself a second Telegib, using a natural-finish Tele body with contours sanded in. This instrument has double zebra pickups and a Gibson tune-o-matic bridge. This is the instrument that was copied for the Seymour Duncan 35th Anniversary guitar, and recently Duncan made himself a copy of this in red.
Here is a fine pair of Greco TL600Js.