Nothing to say about the car today.
Thought I'd share this little project that's been going on for about 5-6 months.
- Own work
- Own work
It all started when I bought a cheapo fake telecaster for £1, that's a story in itself and took about 3 years. I was just going to put some ok pickups on it and play it but got carried away. The body has now been customised and contoured. It will be finished by lichtenberg burning some patterns onto the front.
It's having a mahogany neck and fretboard, found a nice piece in the stores. That little block is an offcut being used as a colour sample.
The scratch plate will be flowjet stainless steel as will the silver coated part of the bridge which a friend is milling out for me. I only bought the bridge for the brass bits and so my miller has a template. The rest of the hardware will be a mixture of SS and brass, with all screws in brass.
A friend of mine is responsible for all the woodwork, including fabricating the neck and fretboard. The deal we have is I will wind a set of pickups for his Stratocaster which he is also making in return for the woodwork.
The electrics are quite unique on this guitar. I'm winding my own pickups and using push button tone pots instead of a selector switch. I've chosen to use 3 pots. Arranged so that each pickup has a volume pot that is tapped to turn the pickup on or off. It will also have one tone pot, wired in the conventional telecaster manner but with the bonus of being a push switch as well which will swap the pickups between series and parallel wiring. I'm quite interested in the effect of having seperate volumes as telecasters drown out the neck pickup when both are on so hopefully I can balance them nicely.
There's a few other touches like mushroom shape strap mounts, again in stainless. The only part I'm struggling to find is a set of stainless or brass tuning pegs. I'd like the capstans and tuners stainless with the rest brass, very tall order really. My brother thinks he has a contact in America that can help but likely at the same cost as the rest of the guitar.
There's still a few things to decide like the type of frets and truss rod to use but I've a good idea where I'm going with those bits. Just some research to do before making a firm decision.
Amazingly this project has been totally poo pooed on the custom telecaster forum as it's not done with standard wiring or as an exact replica of a specific year and model of telecaster. I'm not sure why but I wish they were a bit more like fcf, the project would've been a lot easier with advice from like minded people.
I think it'll take about 6 more months to finish then project build an amp will be started.
I do that too 
