Telecaster build - ironing

Time to complete the electrics.

I used the Seymour Duncan wiring diagrams here for a standard Telecaster. 

I used cloth covered wires as I like the look. They're a bit harder to work with and strip, so I used a little heat shrink at each end to stop them fraying.

Here's a few random pictures. All the earths from the bridge and both pickups were joined before they entered the control cavity. This means there's only one wire to ground onto the the volume pot rather than the three doing it separately, keeping that area a bit tidier. The rest of the wiring was as per the Seymour Duncan page. 



Input jack:



Almost finished control panel:



And all done... 



Just waiting on the control knobs and top hat for the switch. Next post she'll hopefully be strung up and making a noise...

Telecaster build - pickups

I got a package this morning:



This is a set of stock, nickel covered Bare Knuckle Pickups - The Boss model. These came highly recommended by a friend of mine, samples sounded good and, hey, I like Springsteen... Shiny...



There's a tiny bit of wiggle room in how I can mount the scratchplate, and since the pickup mounts to the scratchplate, I had to make sure it was perfectly centred under the strings. So, I strung her up..



Then I had nothing to do! I was, annoyingly, missing the screws to attach the scratchplate. This meant that I couldn't attach the scratchplate, or the control plate, which is slightly dependent on the position of the scratch plate, and  I didn't really want to start soldering until I could do both those things. So, I took a couple more pictures and called it a night :) 

Telecaster build - shielding

Pickups are ordered and en route. I took delivery of a 'light mint' pickguard that is the right colour (third time lucky...). Before the pickups arrive I wanted to get the pickup cavities shielded.

I picked up some copper tape to line the back of the pickguard and cavities:

Starting:



The sides were trimmed as I stuck the tape down until:



Then I used my original body template to cut strips of copper tape to fit at the bottom of the cavities:




I stuck these down into the bottom of the cavities and also taped around the sides, and they looked like this:




And the control cavity:




I think a lot of people use conductive paint for this job. I may use that in the future, but I quite like the shiny look you get from using copper tape. Unfortunately, this tape is not the *good stuff* with conductive glue. I'll have to put little blobs of solder at the joints to complete the Faraday cage.

Pickups should arrive tomorrow... although annoyingly I've lost the nut that I stored in a 'safe place' a couple of months back :]

Telecaster build - fret crowning and polishing

It's time for a coming together of body and neck... 



The neck pocket was probably a little tighter than it needed to be and needed a little 'encouragement':



There was no lacquer chip out around the neck pocket, and given the truss rod can be adjusted without removing the neck, there will be no need to be able to remove this that frequently (plus the internet insists on a tight neck pocket for 'the tone'...)

Neck plate on;



And the scratch plate is offered up. I won't be using this scratch plate either - it's mint green, but to my eyes there's a little too much green in it. I'll check ebay for 'vintage white' or something similar tomorrow:



Next up, I start to recrown the frets. After flattening, their shapes are all uneven and as some have been flattened more than others, they all have different thickness tops. When we recrown them, we put the domed cross section back on them.

First, they're Sharpie'd up again:



Then we run a file along the edges to make them semicircular again. I won't descibr in detail how to do it here, there's plenty of youtube tutorials. Anyway, we round the edges of the frets with a safe edged file, leaving the top untouched (so the Sharpie stays on!). The reason for leaving the top is that we've already spent a considerable length of time in flattening the tops of the frets relative to each other.

After they've been rounded, they look something like this, note how the Sharpie line is untouched but much thinner:



This is done for all the frets. They're then sanded with 800 - 1500 grit paper. I wrap a bit around my finger and run it across the frets - my finger acting as a soft pad to gently polish the frets

At this point, they've been polished to about 1500:



Certain manufacturers would leave the frets at this level of polish. However, we can go further! I hit them with some metal polishing compound:



Which makes them significantly more shiny (on the left):



Once all the frets are fully polished:



And with the tape removed:



The frets look good, but I'm not particularly strong at this aspect of guitar setup. I'll see how they play, but it's possible it may have to take a trip to a friendly luthier for a real setup and fret job :]

I'm going to order some pickups and the rest of the electrical parts tomorrow, then with a bit of luck we should be able to get a sound out of it shortly afterwards!

Telecaster build - flatten those frets

I took delivery of a fret rocker and a slotted straight edge from Crimson guitars, so the fret job could begin. I'm not great at this, and still learning a lot so it's entirely possible there are horrible mistakes in the process I use (or displayed in the pictures below!). 

Ben Crowe (of Crimson guitars) has a pretty good tutorial of this process on Youtube to follow through.... if you want to watch something extremely masochistic, there's a video of a True Temperament fret installation here *shudders*

Here's the tools I'll use: 



First off, we need to ensure that the neck is exactly straight, and make small adjustments to the truss rod if not. This neck has a double action truss rod, so can be made to flex in both directions. Unbelievably, though, it was exactly straight without any adjustment needed. Proof: 



And close up, in the middle of the neck:



Now I put a 45 degree bevel on the edge of the frets using my angled file, taking great care not to take too much off or allow the file to touch the lacquered rosewood on the side of the neck. 



Next up, the fingerboard is masked off... this takes a surprisingly long time. 



To this:



Now, we know that the fingerboard is straight, but the frets are likely all slightly different heights - some having been hammered in more / less during their installation. We are going to run a long file along the length of the fretboard, until we know that all the frets are the same height. 

I begin by colouring in the frets with a Sharpie:



Then start to run my file up the neck. I make a single pass along the whole length of the neck, moving along the frets from right to left. This way all the frets get filed the same amount so their radius is retained:



After a few passes with the file, high and low spots can be seen. Here for example, the Sharpie has not yet been filed off the bottom edge of the fifth fret from the right, so the file has not touched it yet. That is a low spot, and all the others must be filed down to meet it. 



Eventually, all the frets will have a blue line having been filed off to some degree:



This means that they've all been touched by the file. Given that we know the fingerboard is straight, and the file is straight, if they've all been touched we can be confident that the top of the frets are all now 'straight'. 

Next up, we use a fret rocker. This is placed across three frets at a time, along the width of the fret and 'rocked'. You can feel if the centre fret is higher than its neighbours as it wiggles a little, indicating that some work is required on that centre fret:



And at the nut end:



Prior to the fret rocking check, we knew that the frets we all level across their tops - i.e. that a line joining the very tops of the frets to each other would be straight. Once the fret rocker check also passes, we know that all the frets are the exact same height as their neighbour, so we know that that line must be parallel to the fingerboard. 

Eventually, I end up with my frets all exactly level to each other, along the length of my fingerboard. 



You can see that some of these frets have been filed more than the others, so have a much larger flat surface on the top. The next job will be to recrown each of them - filing a uniform 'domed' shape back into them all. Then they will be polished to a high shine.

Telecaster build - tuning machines

Finally, all the polishing was finished. I'd painted over a couple of cracks on the body and buffed them out again so now both the neck and body are finished to my finest polishing compound. Overall I'm very happy, though they're by no means perfect. There are a couple of cracks in the body which will conveniently be covered by the pickguard, and there is the odd imperfection in the paint. However, there comes a point where I think you have to call it a day and it is sufficiently shiny :). Here's the front of the guitar:



I'm waiting for a couple of tools to be delivered to help set up the guitar and dress the frets - I only have a 24.75" scale length (Les Paul scale) notched straight edge so I'm awaiting delivery of a 25.5" Fender version. Until that arrives, there were a couple of other things to do.

Firstly, I almost bought a neck rest, before remembering I had a nice hunk of mahogany in the shed that would be perfect for the job. This was done by eye, and nothing is straight on it, but it will definitely do the job! From this:



To this:



It's finished with teak oil, the neck rest has a sheet of cork gluing in to protect the guitars when in use.

Then I started to fit the tuning machines. To my mind, vintage style tuners are pretty much a necessity on a telecaster, I'll be fitting Gotoh locking tuners.

I'd read that you should press fit the bushes for the tuners in a clamp whilst they're hot. The heat melts the nitrocellulose and stops it cracking. This sounds very sensible, but I can't see how it's possible - I tried it once and ended up with a very hot bush that I couldn't touch to align or move tools / clamps around . It all got a bit stressful. Maybe I was lucky, but I managed to brute force them in my bench vice without any cracking:



It's a bit worrying clamping onto the neck after all that work, but I used cauls and shop towel to protect it in the vice.

Once all six were in:



I popped the tuning machines in from the back. You may recall I used the stew mac jig to make sure the holes were all dead straight, so the tuning machines fell into place nicely. It's worth checking they align though, you can get a fraction of a mm of adjustment before screwing them in.

I positioned and marked the holes for the screws:



Then worked my way across the tuners, marking / drilling / attaching...



... until:



And from the front:



It looks pretty good - I'd suggest that the stew mac jig is a required piece of kit for fitting these style tuning machines - at least if you're using a hand drill as I do. There's only a little wiggle room in fitting the tuners as they all touch and share attaching screws so any mistakes in the tuning holes you drill would compound along the length of the six .

Things left to do:

- Fret level / dress
- Install bridge
- Install nut and strings, sort out action
- Install scratchplate
- Install electrics

Telecaster build - ooooh... shiny...

It's been a quiet few weeks. However, I recently got back into the swing of things with finishing the sanding and polishing of the neck! 

To be honest, it's such a long job that I'd been putting it off, but a concerted effort in the past couple of weeks have just yielded some extremely motivating results.

I didn't take too many pictures, but basically start at about 1000 grit (800 if you're feeling bold) and follow the same procedure for the neck as the body. The there are a lot of edge to be careful of, and avoid getting water on the fretboard. 

By about 1500 grit, I was here:



and thinking about leaving it without polishing - the satin finish is pretty, and I prefer playing with the neck like this. However, I couldn't resist giving it a little polish to see what it looked like...



The grain looked amazing, so I polished the whole neck through three grades of polish:



And:



And at this point, there's obviously no choice but to put the neck and body together to see how it's going to look:



It'll have a mint pickguard rather than the white one, but it looks exactly as I wanted it to when I started out.

I have a few more sessions on the body - I had to paint over some small cracks in the nitro which need buffing out again - but then we're onto the fret and neck work and the electrics!