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I have mentioned “the Telecaster” a few times – this is now almost two Telecasters. My first foray into guitar building was a Grizzly Telecaster-style guitar kit. This had everything needed to put together a Fender Telecaster-like electric guitar. I upgraded a bunch of electronics on it, tried to trick out the cheap wood body, eventually swapped out the neck for an actual Fender one, and ultimately decided to redo the whole thing. That project kinda ended up in limbo and then I started this Danelectro Covid build.
As noted a post or two back though, I’ve gotten to the clear coat stage of the new build, and want to use the can of clear spray on the Covid guitar AND the Telecaster body. So the entire Telecaster was disassembled, and I put it back together (almost all together…) with all the original cheap components:
In order to get the new body to the point that it can be clear coated, I had a bit of work to do. I didn’t photo-document this process much, but the upshot is I had a big slab of southern swamp ash with a flame maple top glued to it (OK, I might have chambered the body as well to reduce weight) shaped to the Telecaster specs. Final stuff was similar to that of the Covid guitar – routing the top of the guitar for binding (in this case, black binding, but only on the top):
Routing this body required a fancy home made jig, of course… The Covid guitar top is flat, so I could simply use the router table to cut the notch into the edge of the body, but with this Telecaster body, I actually shaped the top face slightly, so a jig was needed to allow the router bit to follow the contour of the face. In the above pic you can see the router on a vertical sliding table (the milk jug is filled with water to counter-balance the weight of the router).
From the side, the router bit follows the side of the guitar body with a bearing; sorry for the fuzzy pic, but there’s a rounded wooden donut that follows the top of the guitar body as well; this gets the height right.
Channel cut, the body gets binding:
After that sets up, I used some powdered dyes to colour the top and sides. With the fancy flame maple top, I mixed an orange-red and applied that, then sanded much of it off. With flame maple, there is a 3D effect the wood gives off due to the way the wood’s grain ‘undulates’ up and down. Dye or stain can get down deep into the figure of the grain, so when I then sand most of it away, I follow up with a more yellowy orange on top. The deeper colour shows through giving it a rather impressive look.
And 2D pictures don’t really do the effect justice. Anyways, this is followed up with a clear sanding sealer/grain filler, and sanded down to around 400 grit. We are now ready to clear coat both guitar bodies, but that’ll be another post!
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