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