DIY Music

I am a real sucker for figured maple tops, and so right away here is one significant difference between this project and the first.  Although there isn’t much difference in the color schemes, the Tele II has a slight hint of cherry sunburst (another of my weaknesses) while Tele I is tobacco sunburst.  Perhaps the most significant difference will be that the electronics cavities in the Tele II body is routed in such a way as to not leave any exposed wiring channels which will require a pick guard to hide.  The wiring channels have instead been bored from cavity to cavity so there are no unsightly gaps in that beautiful wood and there will be no need to cover any of that awesome quilt with a piece of tortoise plastic. 

The neck that I opted for on this project has a rosewood fingerboard as opposed to the blonde maple fingerboard on Tele I.  The exposed maple on this neck has been stained to have an aged appearance which really goes well with the colors in the body. 

This is a picture of the neck and body joined together so you can see how well the colors look.  This is going to be a beautiful axe and I really hope it turns out to be a good player.

I am going for gold hardware on this one like I did on Tele I, however I am using a different style of tuners on this one.  I used a set of Wilkenson Vintage Kluson style tuners on Tele I which required that I find another set of bushings which were required for mounting them on a modern neck.  Vintage headstocks have smaller bushing holes for the tuners than the more modern headstocks.  For Tele II I am using a set of Grover style tuners which will not require changing out the bushings.

On my first project I decided to go low-cost on pickups because I wasn’t sure if the guitar would be worth the investment in the Seymour Duncan pickups that I had my eye on at the time.  I was concerned that it may not turn out to be a good player so my thoughts were that I could always upgrade the pickups at a later date.  The GFS pickups that I used on Tele I sounded so great that I decided that I wouldn’t upgrade.  I decided to go back to GFS pickups because I have since met several others who have used their pickups who are very impressed with them.  The pickups I have for Tele II are GFS Little Punchers, which are single coil-sized humbuckers.  They are wound HOT and are 4-wire pups so you can opt for coil-splitting if you desire to do so.  I have a better plan in mind though.

A friend of mine has a Telecaster which has a 4-position pickup switch instead of the standard 3-position switch.  He has the switch wired to not only include the bridge-both-neck setup, but the 4^th position uses both pickups out of phase which creates yet another really nice tone option.  I am going to use the same

4-position setup that my friend uses.

Locating the correct bridge for this body has been a real challenge.  On my first project I learned that there is a variety of bridge designs and sizes for Telecasters.  I had to order 3 different bridges in order to find  one that will work, which turns out to be a Classic Tele bridge.  I do not like the 3-saddle Tele bridges because I can see the potential for intonation problems when you have two strings per saddle.  Like the bridge on Tele I, for this project I am using a 6-saddle bridge so that each string can be adjusted independently from the rest. 

I am really anxious to get this thing put together.  Finding the correct bridge to match the pre-drilled holes and the pickup cavity has been the major choke point in the progress of this project.  Now that I have all of the parts, I should be able to proceed with the assembly, which I hope to accomplish very soon.