Telecaster build - side dots, neck fitting, lasers!

The side dots and neck fitting are almost the last piece of carpentry needed on this guitar.

Carefully mark the position of the side dots along the side of the fretboard. Double check - it would be bad at this stage to get one in the wrong position...



And I drill a hole for the side dots I baked earlier:



Unfortunately I forgot to take picture of the next stages, it's a pretty easy job, drop some superglue in the holes and then pop the side dots in. Once they're sanded down they look like this:



I moved onto joining the neck to the body. First the screw holes at the heel are drilled using a drill guide to keep them at 90 degrees to the body:



Then the neck is put in. The router templates I used seemed to have the neck template slightly oversized relative to the neck pocket - this allows you to get a very tight fit by sanding the neck down to meet the pocket size. After a few tweaks, the neck fits and holds itself for the first time:



Getting the neck in the pocket straight is key. The nut and the bridge must lie exactly along the centre line of the body. I like to use a frickin' laser beam to line everything up:



The laser should follow the centre line of the body, then hit the centre of the nutslot: 




Obviously you can't see anything in this picture, but it looks pretty cool. Once it's lined up, clamp the neck in and drill the screw holes into the neck.

So here's the guitar, neck bolted on, carpentry complete:



It's light - before the hardware it weighs 5lbs; thinline telecasters appear to vary a bit in weight but I'm pretty sure this sits somewhere near the weight of a standard US guitar.

This guitar will now take a back seat. I'm going to go back to the solid body guitar and get it to the same state before starting to finish sand them both.