Telecaster

Building a Telecaster: part 3

By Simon Barber on January 15, 2010 — 1 min read

In part 2, I treated the ash body of the guitar with Danish Oil. This warmed up the colour a little but kept the natural grain of the wood as I intended. After applying several coats, I waited for it to dry properly and then buffered it so that it developed a sheen. It’s now protected against moisture and other potential problems.

The next stage was to assemble all of the parts and get started with mounting the bridge and pickups. For this I enlisted the help of my friend Nick, who is the sort of guy who can help you go from zero to guitar hero with the help of a soldering iron and a screwdriver. Armed with all of the parts and my trusty iPhone for photo blogging, we met at Nick’s garage to begin the build.

I was amazed at how quickly the guitar started to come together. The routing for the wiring and through-body stringing was already done by the luthier, so we decided to first assemble the bridge. This involved mounting the pickups on springs in order to allow them to be adjusted. Following this, we carried out the earthing/grounding work on the pickups by soldering the wires as instructed by some articles I had brought along.

Finally, everything was installed and locked down tight. You can see these stages pictured in the gallery. Next up, I’ll be blogging the installation of the pickguard/scratchplate, control plate, jack and machine heads.

Posted in: Guitars

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