I had fun today with a local lead guitar player. His band has been touring the US for the past year or so in small venues for barely any cash. He's a young guy, out of college, engineer, worked a year, then went on the road with the band....
He has some nice guitars, a Warrior, a Rickenbacker, and his favorite, a used Japanese Fender Tele, he gave 400 for at a large guitar store. He prizes this guitar due to it's neck and the Noiseless Pickups.
Well, I'd asked him to come by and let me measure out and record that neck for posterity. He is one of the best electric guitar players in these parts.
After cutting off a near new set of strings, I got my measurements. I asked if the broken nut bothered him, "Well some, but it doesn't affect the playing." Mmmmmm hmmmm, you want me to make you a new one? Yeah came his reply. I didn't tell him until well into the project that his new nut came from Petco and a dog chew bone....
I sanded and polished it, pva'ed it in place and turned to his horrible fret wear. We discussed the major divots and what could be done and ended up fret-levelling and recrowning. The big issue for him though was fret protrusion, just thousandths of an inch but he didn't like it a bit.
After a quick trip with the angled file tool we took the file out of the holder and addressed the tangs, knowing it would probably touch the finish to get to the problem, it did. But I could tell he was happy with the result.
Then we pulled out the 0000 steel wool and went after some lacquer roughness on the back of the neck, it cleaned it right up and made the lacquer very slick indeed. He hated it.
His other guitars it seems had some type of hand rubbed finish, not lacquer. After feeling the neck and his description, I could feel the lacquer resisting my hand? Hmmmm. He wanted a bare wood feel, and liked the light color of bare maple. There was nothing to do but strip the amber-tint lacquer off the neck. For that I turned to my furniture stripper and we kind of relic-ed the neck out, tracing outlines of where his hand stopped both ends of the neck.
Of course, anyone could tell, this thing was stripped bare, but.... he loved it, especially after again hitting the bare maple with the skunk stripe with 0000 steel wool.
We slapped a set of strings on, I dropped the action to bare minimums and checked his neck relief. Andy tosses it in the ATA case and we turned out the lights. He was beaming from ear to ear.
I was given a Tele Thinline Ash body and was thinking of setting it up with a Mighty Mite neck. I'd want to take the neck down to the Specs of Andy's Tele and since he's so happy with the Noiseless pickups thought of using those too.
Where is the best place to acquire everything I'd need for a bare Tele? Any of you guys like Telecasters?
