November Telescapades #1 - 11/11 Demo Added

[MichaelW]

Ok, turns out I have a couple more Tele's left to build.

But after these two....THAT'S IT!......... .
Honestly I'm simply running out of room for any more guitars. I just bought a bunch of cases and gigbags to be able rotate my "Walll" of guitars in and out of the closet. My last niggle is finding a gig bag for my Firebird. It's huge and an oddball shape.....but I digress....

So first up is something I've been mulling over for the better part of a year now.
After getting my Sunday Handwound pickups installed in my Jazzmaster, I realized how much I love the way it sound.
The original pickups (Fender Pure Vintage 65's) just didn't do it for me. Installing the SHW's made the guitar come alive for me.

But.....I'm still just not getting on with the Jazzmaster shape and geometry. Feels like my hands are all in the wrong places when I play it.
(I'm having the same issue with my Firebird).

So I got to thinking, how can I get this sound into my favorite platform of all, the Telecaster. (Leo got so many things right all those years ago).
I was considering having a custom body made but finally decided to see if couldn't modify and off the shelf body and make it work.

So after watching for an MJT body that would work, I discovered this guy, Rosser Guitars on Ebay.
These are nitro finished bodies at about 1/2 the price of an MJT or BloomDoom. He saves the money on kind of a 1/2 finished body.
It's a better finish than NoMoonLaser but it doesn't look like he's using grain filler.
Anyway, it's not a bad looking body although the finish is pretty thin. I found that just wiping off a spot with IPA would start going through the pigment.

Anyway, here's what I started out with. The P90 routes will allow me to "over route" them for the Jazzmaster pickups.
The only problem was that the string through holes have been drilled as well as the string ground hole. I would but trying to patch these holes and still have some finish work to do. (Waiting for some tinted lacquer). I also much prefer a top loaded control plate than the more typical "Cabronita: style bodies.




You can tell from this shot how the finish looks. It's not quite satin but definitely not gloss.





I tried a couple of different necks and the neck pocket is cut really nice and smug. Definitely a plus in my book.







In order to accommodate the Mustang/Jazzmaster/Jaguar type bridge, I needed to add a shim for some additional neck angle.
I started with a 1 degree shim and was expecting to have to add another 1 degree shim for a total of 2 degrees. Turns out I haven't had to.


To locate the bridge thimble posts. I measured from the nut to the center of the 12th fret, The doubled that measurement again for my measurement to the center of the saddle. That gave me the location of the new Mustang bridge.


On the bass side I canted it back by an 1/8th of an inche.


Drilling the hole for the post thimbles.....


Thimbles installed........


The bridge itself does a pretty job of hiding the extra holes. I filled them with furniture repair putty and pin of drop fill them with some tinted lacquer.

Stay tuned for part II tomorrow..........

 

[MichaelW]

Continuing on from last night when I was drifting off in the middle of posting.......heh

Just mocking things up before routing here.....


I decided to route the neck pickup route with the pickguard on.....



I have to say this was one of my most challenging builds. Largely because I used MDF board templates. which work great on bare bodies, not so much for finished bodies. Really hard to keep them from moving on you during routing. I totally borked the tremolo route......looks fugly as hell...



You can tell the template shifted on me during the route. The usually double sided tape I use for plexiglass templates just wasn't holding the LDF templates down in place securely.........as I found out the hard way.

But I still was able to recover with only some minor gaps. I filled the larger gap (about 1/16th of an inch showing at the top of the tremolo) with some shaped wood that I super glued in then patched with some furniture repair filler. I still have some touch up work to do.





Wired her up and put some set up strings on her to check the neck geometry. I was surprised that I all worked!
I didn't need to add any more shim to get a decent break angle at the bridge. And could play it as hard as I wanted and the strings all stayed in place on the bridge and I have no buzzing to sitar-ing.



I wanted to use a StayTrem bridge but there's an 8 week wait. So instead I used a Fender American Professional Jazzmaster bridge. I was reading on some of the forums that some folks think this is actually a better bridge than the StayTrem for a lot less money.

All I can say is that it blows away the Mustang bridge that came on my Squier Jazzmaster.
The tremolo and arm are Fender American Vintage. Same one as I used on my Jazzmaster upgrade. And like that one, I had to grind the collet hole a bit to keep the trem from rubbing. Once that's done, it's smooth as silk.

 

[MichaelW]

Despite not being 100% happy with the execution, man this thing plays and sounds FANTASTIC!
The pickups are the Sunday Handwound "Woody" set. Which has the Woody+ in the bridge.
7.3k neck, 9.1k bridge.

I'm still waiting for some addition pickup foam so I can adjust the pickups.
And the aforementioned lacquer touch up in a few spots.

But I'm calling this one done.

Stay tuned for a demo.......

 

[almondcity]

Super cool. I have my tele with JM neck and tele bridge and it's awesome to have that neck sound there

 

[KR Sound]

THAT'S IT

Where have I heard this before?

 

[jimilee]

Wow, very cool.

 

[MichaelW]

Super cool. I have my tele with JM neck and tele bridge and it's awesome to have that neck sound there

Actually I think that's where the seed of the idea started, I was thinking about a JM neck then decided to go whole hog.

 

[Alan W]

As always, I am super impressed with your taking on the types of machining you do with so few "larger" tools. (This is only because of the results you usually get, and let's face it, placement of holes on a fretted instrument is precision work.)

In terms of using MDF as templates, or in terms of having it NOT slip, this is the tape that we use to fixture small parts (not metals, as they would heat up enough to release the adhesive) while being run through table saws, mills, etc.:

Double sided tape-Heavy Duty Double Sided Flatback Paper Tape - Intertape 591

Heavy duty double sided flatback paper tape with a white creped paper liner. Very versatile product, it's adhesive structure is permanent but it can be removed fairly easily from almost all hard surfaces. You can then remove the tape after cutting and it doesn't leave a residue.

martecktexas.com

I've linked to a distributor, but the important thing is the tape, "intertape 591." This is a crepe backed, double sided tape. It holds (assuming flat clean surfaces0, really well. So well, that if laminating two sheets of acrylic with it, unless we "de-adhere" it using alcohol, (which is another great thing about it—it will release very easy with some alcohol), we can't separate the plastic without breaking it. (So—for this use, especially on a body that has a finish affected by alcohol, it may not be the best solution)—but over the years we tried many different doublesticks, (since machining a few small grooves into something the size of a pea would be really difficult otherwise...) and never found one that was as easy to use as this. Another plus for my shop was that even though it seems to measure .007 inches thick, when you laminate with it, and press the surfaces (or bang them together with a rubber mallet) it adds exactly .010 to the thickness, which made it even easier to use when machining.

 

[MichaelW]

Demo added here.

 

[sticky1138]

Is there a method you used to figure out how far from the bridge/neck to position the JM pickups, or did you just kind of eyeball it? Their size doesn't give you much space to work with, so in many cases you can't simply align them with the pole pieces of the stock pickup.

 

[MichaelW]

Is there a method you used to figure out how far from the bridge/neck to position the JM pickups, or did you just kind of eyeball it? Their size doesn't give you much space to work with, so in many cases you can't simply align them with the pole pieces of the stock pickup.

I half eyeballed it because there was already P90 routes in there and I needed to create a "shelf" for the screw mounts for the JM pickups.

Turns out my "eyeballing" wasn't that far off.

I also have a JM Pickup template I got off Ebay.

 

[Band of Dans]

Nicely done! This post is helping me work up the nerve to drill some holes for the tele/jazzmaster pile of parts that's been sitting on my workbench for the last few months: an MJT thinline tele with the JM routes already in place. Maybe you bid on it when it was on ebay? The original buyer fell through so MJT offered it to me ~a month after the listing ended.

My "main" guitar is a JM so the plan is to load the tele-jazz-caster-master with a high output tele bridge pickup and p90 neck to complement the tamer pickups in my "real" JM.

 

[MichaelW]

Nicely done! This post is helping me work up the nerve to drill some holes for the tele/jazzmaster pile of parts that's been sitting on my workbench for the last few months: an MJT thinline tele with the JM routes already in place. Maybe you bid on it when it was on ebay? The original buyer fell through so MJT offered it to me ~a month after the listing ended.

My "main" guitar is a JM so the plan is to load the tele-jazz-caster-master with a high output tele bridge pickup and p90 neck to complement the tamer pickups in my "real" JM.

Nope I've never seen an MJT with JM routes, that would have saved me a TON of headache heh.
This is my sloppiest work. Looks ok in the pics but under closer scrutiny the routes are a bit sloppy.

Having said that, I installed more foam under the pickups this afternoon and have the pickups adjusted correctly, they sound fabulous!

 

[Band of Dans]

Nope I've never seen an MJT with JM routes, that would have saved me a TON of headache heh.
This is my sloppiest work. Looks ok in the pics but under closer scrutiny the routes are a bit sloppy.

Having said that, I installed more foam under the pickups this afternoon and have the pickups adjusted correctly, they sound fabulous!

It's just more relic'ing, right? Probably makes the guitar more valuable