I’ve been asked to put together a Telecaster for a customer.  He has most of the parts but wants it put together professionally.  Most of the parts are new, apart from the neck, it’s from an old favourite guitar so he wants to incorporate it into the new guitar.

Its seen some action so the first stage is to give it a good cleanup and fret-dress.

Frets levelled and the first fret re-shaped and polished..

Neck completed.  That’s probably the hardest part of the job, an afternoon with the files and micromesh polishing cloth.

The next step of course is to fit the neck to the body.  Not quite as easy as I would have liked as the neck pocket was just too small for the neck.  However with a coupe of hours work and some very sharp chisels and it’s in.  Since it’s a second-hand neck there are a some witness marks from the old body but I’m sure I’ll be able to find some wax or lacquer to hide those.

I’ve also plugged all the old holes since they don’t quite line up with those on the body.

Put it all together, clamp it firmly in place and drill the holes.

Once the neck is in place it’s a case of working out exactly where the rest of the hardware goes, starting with the intonation line.

The height at the bridge looks good now but I won’t really know how it will work out until the strings are attached and at full tension.

The bridge came with 2 inserts that fit in the body, I have to say I don’t like it; the fit is far too loose so the bridge is going to move about too much which is going to make setting up the intonation difficult.  I rather think it will harm the sustain as well so I’m going to mount the bridge directly into the body.

There we go for today then….

Starting to fit the hardware I’ve come upon a problem.  Its caused by the fact that the neck is second-hand.  It doesn’t sit entirely square so over the length of the strings the bridge will be out by about 3mm.  That leaves 2 choices:

A:  Line up the pickup mount with the bridge which will require an extra bit of routing on the body and cutting a little bit more pick guard, it’ll leave a gap either side of the chrome pickup surround but I’ll make it match either side.

Alternatively, option B: mount the chrome pickup surround aligned with the rest of the hardware and accept the fact that the bridge will sit about 3mm to the Bass side.

The cutout for the controls is very tight and I already had to take a shave off the pickguard to get it to fit.

Next step, the hardware, even that proved more difficult than I thought.  Since the pick-guard is of a very early design there are no holes for the neck pickup screws.  I’ve mounted the pickup on two springs with screws directly into the body.  Since the pick-guard has to fit over the pickup but under the lip of the fretboard the only way to get the pick-guard in place was to take the neck off again.

Next stage, wire in the electrics.  A slightly unconventional wiring with a 4 position switch so that the pickups can be selected singly, in parallel or series.

Once the wiring was done It’s the final lap, put the strings back and complete the setup.  With the strings at tension it was clear that the action at the first fret is fine and the set in the neck is OK…..

However the action at the other end was way to high, I thought it might be…

The only way to cure that is to reset the angle of the neck at the body by increasing the thickness of the shim that I already added.

Each bridge section has several slots in it so I used the string spacing rule to get the strings right at bottom of the neck.

Once that was done all that’s needed is to set the action height at the bottom of the neck and the intonation.

Job done…