Custom Walnut Telecaster

Building your own guitar is great for a lot of reasons. Once the instrument is complete, you have a real connection to it - considering that you hand selected everything from the wood to the fret wire. Often you end up with a guitar that is of very high quality, while spending less money than you would for a pre-assembled axe. The downsides are that parts ordered from different companies sometimes don't want to work together. Things that look easy to do yourself usually require an amount of precision that isn't available from the household toolbox. And worse yet, these sort of problems don't usually reveal themselves until deep into the build.

But first, lets pause and marvel at this amazing piece of figured walnut. My fledgling photography skills can't even capture the full 3-D effect going on here. It's heavy piece of wood, but very easy on the eyes and ears. The rosewood fingerboard also has exceptional figure and color. The owner really did a good job selecting wood for this guitar. He brought it to us to cut a bone nut and to perform some fret leveling and final setup. As you'll see, its a shame he didn't have us measure and route the bridge placement as well...

Fender style nuts are unique because the bottom of the nut slot will usually be the same radius as the fretboard. This makes geting a good fit just a little bit tougher, so I was happy to find that this guitar actually had a flat bottom slot. It's looking like this will be a 'layup' type job that I'll have done before lunch.

So I line up my outer strings to determine the spacing...

And after some head scratching and second guessing, it becomes obvious that the bridge was installed too far towards the bass side of the guitar. This is causing the high string to taper inward, and the low string runs right off the neck. You need to have the strings running in a straight line from nut to saddle, and as you can see, this is WAY off.

My first thought is that the bridge and pickup need to be re-drilled and re-routed in the correct position.This is a shame, considering the inevitable remnants of mis-placed bridge. On a solid color instrument, we would have a good chance of being able to hide the mistake, but with natural finish like this there is no way to avoid some visible scars.

Luckily enough, the old-school barrel saddles are going to allow us avoid that. I normally loathe this type of saddle because it prevents you from getting accurate intonation, and the strings don't stay put on the smooth surface. We get a lot of customers who are having these issues with their barrel saddles, and we'll use our nut files to cut small grooves into the saddles so that the strings will stay put. This affects the tone in no way, and is really quite necessary. Ironically, the intonation on this guitar was near perfect!

I'll cut the grooves so that the strings will exit the saddle at the proper location. Due to the large, uninterrupted surface area of the barrel saddle, I've got plenty of room to work with. If this guitar had individual saddles, I wouldn't be able to make this happen. I used my string spacing ruler and a straight edge to make sure the spacing was perfect. It looks a little funny behind the saddle, but the strings now line up with the neck, and thats all that matters.

Now that the bridge and strings are lining up, I can finish cutting the nut. I file each slot down to .23" above the first fret, then finish them carefully based on feel.

The nut is finally fit to perfection and polished to a shine.

Now that the guitar is strung up for the very first time, I allow it a few hours to react to the string tension and get used to being a guitar. This neck is incredibly solid and barely moved. A good sign for this guitar!

Here I'm using a great tool that we will soon be selling in our eBay store. It's used to keep the strings far out of the way when you need to get to the frets, fingerboard, or nut. Instead of dealing with annoying loose strings, this keeps them spread neatly so you can work without hassle.

With those meddling strings out of the way, I can go about buffing and polishing the frets. This is some hefty jumbo fret wire, so it takes some serious effort to get them scratch-free and shiny. Pictured here is the coarsest of our fret buffers. I'll take it through four more stages before its all said and done.

Like the icing on a cake, the last touch here is a string tree on the headstock. It could probably use one on the G and D strings as well, and will get one on its next visit.

This guitar plays more like a G&L ASAT than a Fender because of the jumbo frets and flatter radius. It is a quality instrument and is surely the jewel of this owners collection.

I'll leave you with some glamour shots that just couldn't hit the editing room floor.