One more for the road; it seems that this is my month to break into the stash of pickups, tuners and uncompleted project necks to build another Telecaster.
This one is straight up 50s style, nitro finished birdseye maple neck with walnut skunk stripe, Alder 3 color sunburst body, with all nickel plated vintage style components.
There are a couple of departures from 50 ‘s standard to enhance playability.
I’m completely enamored of Bill Lawrence tone circuits and his hand wound noisefree pickups (Wilde brand) are my go to for these builds. This one sports the L200N neck and L290TL-E bridge pickup for authentic 50s sound, a treble bleed circuit, an Orange Drop .47uf cap., a 5 way selector that incorporates a half out of phase setting and an additional neck pickup setting with an integrated .01uf cap that filters out about 10% of the low end making chords sound cleaner.
The neck radius is the more modern profile thin “C” shaped with a 9.5’ radius, the frets are larger than vintage LMI FW74 (Jescar 4380), and the Gotoh cutaway style brige and compensated brass saddles make this a players dream.
I bought the Alder pre-finished body from A and E guitars due to time constraints; as I determined that trying to complete a nitro sunburst and buff out before Christmas was going to be pushing the limits.
Before anyone gets judgy about “buying” a prefinished body, let me say up front that while its not my first choice, its also a required a surprising amount of thought, planning, and detail oriented work to keep the prefinished body pristine while marking and drilling all the required holes and fitting a neck. A wide roll of low tack masking tape is a big help.
I strung this one up this AM and, while I still have a bit of set up work to complete to really dial it in, the tone is killer! Somebody is getting a great gift this year.