Building a sort of Telecaster. Any interest?

The EMGs are active pickups and need a battery so, rather than put it in the control cavity, I’m going to install a battery box which needs a hole.

Moving on to the drop-top. I got this about 10 years ago from Fraser Valley Fine Woods which doesn’t seem to exist any more, and it’s been waiting for an appropriate project. It was quite cheap and they were even offering free postage on some items. This might have been because the dark spots you can see are actually holes, but I think that, if I’m very careful I can get the Tele top out of it and leave all the holes in the off-cuts.

Gluing the two halves of the top together. This is the way I do it for acoustic tops and backs. The two halves are face down. Sometimes tops and backs aren’t exactly the same thickness or they aren’t perfectly flat. The go-bars ensure that the outside face is aligned and any difference in thickness, etc. is on the insie. The less I have to sand off the outside, the better, as the more I sand off, the further away from a perfect book-match it will be. Then I sand the inside face until the thickness is even. Sand the outside until it cleans up and take it down to finished thickness from the inside. Does that make sense?

I thought about making a template for routing the cut-outs in the top for the pickups, but then thought I might never need to use it again, so I drilled 16 holes, joined them up with the jigsaw and cleaned them up with sanding sticks. They might not be perfect, but they’ll be covered by pickup rings.

I decided to drill the holes for the pots and switch before gluing the top to the body, which turned out to be a lucky decision. I used an ordinary drill bit for the two 8mm holes for the pots and it wandered quite badly. It probably wasn’t as sharp as I thought it was and the very curly grain threw it off centre so the holes were obviously out of line. I should have used a brad-point bit and clamped it down. I have a small milling machine, so I clamped the top on the machine table and milled two 12mm holes where the 8mm ones should have been. I then plugged the two holes and re-drilled the 8mm hole with a milling cutter. The plugs aren’t invisible, but they’ll be hidden behind the control knobs.

I test fitted the pots and switch and found that the top at 6.3mm was too thick. So I routed the control area to 4mm thick from the back.

The drop-top is now glued onto the body and trimmed flush but I seem to have forgotten to take any photos. This happens from time to time. I just get involved with what I’m doing and forget about the photos. Anyway, it's beginning to look like a guitar. Some people mask off the edge of the drop-top and stain the rest to create a ‘faux binding’ effect. I want to leave the top its natural colour so I’ve decided to bind the front and I think I ought to do that before finishing the back. Trouble is, I don’t want to use plastic binding and bending the E.I.Rosewood I have is a bit of a problem. I have a home-made 'Fox'-type bender but the Tele shape doesn't really lend itself to that, and I don't have a bending iron. I have a piece of steel tube about 3" diameter with a halogen bulb inside it, but that's no good for the tight curves on a Tele.

So, lacking a bending iron, I decided to try a slightly different method. I’ve bent smaller bits of binding, for head plates by dropping the piece of binding in boiling water for a few minutes and then sandwiching it between two forms and drying it out quickly in a low oven. Like this

The binding kept its shape perfectly and finished up like this.

I had to make two jigs, one for the treble side and one for the bass. This is the one for the treble side in its open position.

Here it’s closed. The centre section gets pressed down first, then the ‘horn and the lower bout. The centre and lower bout are common to both jigs. This photo was taken before I re-worked the inside form to allow for the thickness of the binding.

I painted the binding with ‘Supersoft 2’ and wrapped it in cling-film overnight. The next day I found a piece of copper pipe with a cap on one end, slid the piece of binding into it and filled it with boiling water. I left it in there for about 15 minutes changing the water a couple of times. Then took it out, placed it on the former and clamped it to death. This was the bass side.

Once clamped, I warmed the whole thing up with a paint-stripper type heat gun and then sat it on a radiator and left it overnight (it wouldn’t fit in the oven!). It seems to have worked. There was a fair bit of spring-back but it’s easily pushed into the right shape. I’m leaving them on the formers until I install them. You’ll have noticed there’s a third piece of binding. I’ll explain what that’s for later.

Now it’s ready for the binding. The treble side is straightforward, but the bass side binding has to be pushed down in the bevel area, so reducing it in height to about 2 mm helps it to bend.

The rebate is cut so that, when the binding is installed, it will be a little proud of the top surface and the sides. It’s easier to scrape the binding flush with the top and sides than the top and sides flush with the binding.

I now have to shave the corner off to form the bevel. This leaves a couple of triangular grooves which are filled with two strips softwood.

When I did the bevel on an acoustic guitar I didn’t trust myself to cut it with a spokeshave and keep a constant 45° angle all the way round. So I took most of it off with the spokeshave and then finished off with this sanding contraption.

After sanding , the bevel looks like this. You can see the upper softwood filler. The lower one has almost gone.

Time for the neck pocket. When I decided to make this guitar I thought I’d save myself some time and work by buying a Mighty Mite neck from Stewmac. I made a template using the neck itself. I don’t know if this is the approved method but it worked for me. Place the neck on a piece of MDF. Apply double sided tape to some pieces of wood (I made sure they were dead straight and flat first) and stick them to the MDF butting them up tightly to the neck.

Take the neck out. Cut out most of the MDF where the neck was on the band saw. There’s also a cut-out at the other end which will help me to centralise the template on the body. Route out the remainder.

At this point I realised that the template was too thick to be able to route the whole depth of the pocket without having to change cutters, so I made another one. This thinner template was too flexible where it overhangs the body, so I added two cauls.

Then I positioned the template on the body and I realised that, for the photo, I’d stuck the cauls on the wrong end. They were only held in place with double sided carpet tape, so I pulled them off and put them on the right end. I could now trace the outline of the pocket, and then hog out most of the wood with a Forstner bit.

Then put the template back on the body and routed the remainder of the pocket.

The little white band is a paper scale I print out and stick to the body. This lets me align the template perfectly with the centre line of the body.

Pocket routed

That looks like a pretty good fit. Good enough for me anyway.