Building two matching Pine body telecasters

[Blazer]

Well a couple of weeks ago I decided to get rid of stuff I have lying around and made an inventory of what I can use for a new build and came up with this.

- A Birdseye maple tele neck with a rosewood fingerboard
- A plain maple Strat neck with maple cap fingerboard
- A gold cover Humbucker from a Les Paul Custom
- A Dimarzio Super distortion humbucker
- Two chrome Fender style hard tail bridges, one toploading the other for string through body construction.
- Two sets of Cast sealed tuners, one for each neck.
- Two chrome humbucker rings.

So with that I decided to build two matching pine body Teles which if all goes well will look like this.


So with that in mind I started work two weeks ago on the bodies.

The second body during the routing


The two bodies


This would've been the body for the tele neck


And this would've been the one for the strat neck.

I eventually decided to drop the idea of using the necks I had lying around and instead opted to made the necks from scratch, also when talking to Jack T Ripper, our second guitarist, he asked me if it were possible to give the guitars 24 fret necks and I found no reason why it shouldn't be possible. It also makes that I have to give the guitars a Gibson 24, 1/5 scale length.


One of the necks while the glue was setting.


And here's the neck after the glue dried and I planed it. This particullar neck was made from rest pieces of other necks we made, it consists of three main pieces of Birds eye maple, two layers of rosewood veneer, two layers of maple veneer and two layers of lacewood veneer, the effect as you can tell is striking, this will be a KILLER neck.


As for work on the bodies, I finished routing the neck pockets....


...and started work on the routing of the electronics compartment.


And off we go....


Slow and steady wins the race


And routing a pocket to recess the backplate so it looks and feels smooth.


Finished


Time to whip out the grain filler.


For both bodies of course.


And here's how they look after the first sanding when the filler has set.


And from behind too of course

[godofthunder]

Nice work, I wonder how pine will sound ? Resonant I would think.

[Chris P.]

I believe the first Fender Broadcasters/Telecasters were made of pine. Some Squiers have it again.

[Nocturnal]

So this Pine he's using is just the normal pine like you would find at Home Depot? It looks that way to me.

Nice work,BTW. That neck looks interesting.

[Blazer]

So this Pine he's using is just the normal pine like you would find at Home Depot? It looks that way to me.

Yup. If it's good enough to build houses from it's good enough to build guitars from, right?

[drbassman]

Hey, is that  milling machine you're using here?  Tell me more about that, I've been thinking that could be a cool machine to use for guitar building.