Telecaster Two build - body routing

I'm building two guitars at the same time, hoping to get some efficiency savings (especially later when it comes to painting / curing time). 

This is the second body, which will be a standard solid body. Two piece swamp ash, not a bookmatched top, it will get a solid colour: 



I marked a centre line and traced around the template. I picked up this trick of tracing the template using a washer to get a slightly bigger outline. This makes it a bit more of a relaxed operation to cut out to this outline rather than worry about slipping on the real shape.  



I only have a little bandsaw, so make a lot of relief cuts. You can see that I cut to the outside line of the template:



Once the body is rough cut, the template has to be attached. I mask off both the body and the template with cheapo masking tape, then stick them together with superglue, sounds a bit odd, but holds them together extremely strongly:




First pass with the router:



Change bits and make another pass:



And another;



And one more after this yields a second body shape:





I forgot to measure the weight of the first body before I hollowed it out. I weighed these two and the solid body weighed in at exactly 6lbs (it will end up a bit less than this as there the various cavities to rout out yet). I don't really know what this means the final guitar weight will be, but I do know that at 3.75lb, the hollowing out of the first body appears to have had a significant effect. 

There's all kind of chit chat on the internet about what this weight reduction will do to the 'tele tone' (tm), I guess we'll have to wait and see...

Telecaster build - binding 2

Putting the binding on the back of the guitar is trickier than the front - the binding material has to go all the way round the heel, which means two 90 degree bends. In addition, the material forms a complete loop around the guitar body, which means it has to be joined at some point. You want this join to be seamless and invisible if at all possible.

I made a couple of jigs to allow the bending in the heel area to be done off the guitar body, where the recurves get in the way: 




I only had enough binding material in the right colour for one go, so I did a practice... 



Applying heat from the heat gun, the first corner went on pretty well...

...The second corner, less so.  



However, a couple of tries through both jigs later, and the shape was made:



So, time to do it for real. I wanted to measure where on the length of binding to make the heel curves. In effect, you're choosing where to put the binding joint. It's easier to join it on a flat part of the guitar (like the back). In addition, I wanted to put the joint slightly off centre on the back as it will be slightly less noticable - people's eyes get drawn to the centre of the guitar so putting it somewhere else can be beneficial. My old luthiery tutor told me that - sounds plausible! 

The length of the binding material from the tentative (slightly off centre) binding join to the heel is measured using string: 



And the binding is bent for real:



One down:



Two down: 



And it fits well around the heel (weird angle photo...):



The binding is glued on again, at speed. No photos as I was working quickly:



But once it's on, you can start to pick up how it's going to look:



Annoyingly, I got my string measurement wrong, and measured from the wrong end of the binding :) This put the binding joint in both a slightly trickier area on the top of the guitar. It's also in a much more visible place, right on the top where the forearm contour would be on something like a strat. 
It shouldn't be a problem - the joint is good, and it should be possible to make it invisible by brushing it with acetone to slightly melt the binding material.  

After a few hours, the tape is removed



There's one small, and fairly manageable gap near the heel:



But overall, given this was my first time using plastic binding, I'm pretty happy with how it looks: 






I'll do some scraping / planing / low grit sanding to level the binding off and remove the glue squeeze out, but after that I'm going to call it a day on this body. 

Next up is Tele 2. I want to get them both in the same state before starting on their necks.

Telecaster build - binding!

[No longer posting retrospectively...]

Binding looks classy; this is how I want this guitar to look; better get on with it. 

I did a test:

Looks pretty good: 

So went for it for real. This was stressful. Pretty high risk on an otherwise finished body. However, it went well:

And even looks pretty good around the heel, bit of router burn as you go accross the grain, but nothing too bad (I've seen, and certainly done, much worse!):

One more shot:

Then I got ready to glue. I used weld on glue (the stuff Stew Mac sell) which isn't workable for all that long. Get all your tape torn off in advance and line it up within easy reach of the piece of work: 

And go for it. Here's a halfway shot, working pretty quickly so it's the only one I took: 

Clamped in one of my forstner bits to bold the sharp little radius by the heel:

And a few hours later:

Just need to resist the temptation to start working the binding, the glue apparently needs a few days to fully cure.

Unbelievably, this is biggest, and only, gap in the binding (right on the top of the horn). Should be no problem to cover this up with acetone (or superglue given how small it is):

Pretty happy with how this turned out, rear binding to do next which should be much trickier thanks to trying to get it around the heel. The binding material felt like it didn't want to bend much more than that sharp curve in the upper bout, so got a bit of reading up to do in the next couple of days on techniques to get it round the corners of that heel. I imagine heat, acetone and a nice cup of tea will be involved...

Cavity routing and channel shielding

Having redrawn centre lines, I routed out the neck pockets (16mm depth - important) and pickup cavities (c. 20mm depth - less important). I also drilled the wire holes through.



I'd been toying for a while with lining these with brass, and grounding them along with the rest of the shielding. I can't imagine it'll make a huge difference, but also couldn't think of a reason not to do it... so...



(this looks really wonky, and it is. It's intentional to avoid drilling along the glue line in the middle of the body!)

Resulting in:



... and...



And the body is complete:

Telecaster build - routing the chambers

Although I'm going to put the work in and hollow out the body, I don't want anyone to be able to tell it's anything other than a standard Tele, and I want to be able to fully shield the inside. I don't know how (if?) Fender do this on their thinline teles, but I intend to do it in the usual fashion by lining the inside of the control cavity and pickup cavities with something metallic. Therefore, the pickup and control cavities will be exactly the same as on a standard Tele. 

Pictures will make more sense:



This pile of dust seemed significantly bigger as I was routing... stuff gets everywhere. Don't forget your facemasks kids...:



The final shape, the bridge cavity is slightly predrilled to ease the work once the top goes on:



Note that the walls are thicker in each of the horns (particularly the top one to allow for the strap button to screw in) and at the back for the other strap button. 

Then there was the small matter of spool clamps... To clamp the top onto this you want pressure all the way around it. Spool clamps do the job, but they're a bit pricey and it's not like they've got loads of other uses. I made a bunch of these, it took an entire evening:



And clamped the top onto the guitar, along with an F clamp and lever to apply a bit of pressure in the middle of the body:




The body now just requires the cavities and neck pocket to be routed.

Telecaster build - joining the body and top

I want this guitar to be light, so it's going to be heavily chambered, this necessitates a separate body and top. I ordered two piece top and bottoms, and planed the edges square and joined them.

The two sides of the top were held together with pins / wedges:





And weighed down with paint pots :) 



And the main body:

Telecaster build

Posting retrospectively, this is the beginning of my telecaster build.

Obligatory materials post. There's enough here for two guitars, I'll be building the pair in tandem. Lovely flame maple and birdseye maple neck blanks and swamp ash bodies. 

Yep, it fits...

Some details of what's going to be built:

Tele 1
Double bound, hollow, black, birdseye maple / rosewood neck, classic tele pickups / controls, top loader bridge, chrome hardware, 9.5" radius fretboad, 

Tele 2
Solid body, colour tbd, flame maple / maple neck, pickup config tbd, chrome grear, some inlay somewhere on fretboard , compound radius (10" -> 14.5") fretboard