I know what you're thinking...
"What kind of a flim-flam-scam are you running here? That's not a Tele!"
This is true. The shape drawn on that body blank is not a Telecaster shape. It is an altogether different animal. It is, in fact, not even in the correct Genus (Fender). That is a Gibson Les Paul body shape.
I have turned this blog into a Den of Lies!
Come along with me - let's have some fun...
For those of you coming here for the first time - the original Telecaster build can be found 'below.'
By that I mean - see the older posts from 2008. For those of you who have not closed your browser window - let's see what's going on here.
First, why am I building a Les Paul? The easy answer is, "Why not?" The slightly longer answer is that it is more challenging to build a Les Paul than it is a Tele because of the carved top. It's also usually harder to build a guitar with a 'set' (e.g. glued-in) neck. ...but I'm not doing that.
I'm building this with a bolt-on neck (as I'll explain in a later post).
So, because it's not a real Les Paul - I don't have to worry about copyright (or is it trademark) infringement then - now do I? Fingers crossed!
There's one guy in the peanut gallery shouting, "Why don't you just carve the Telecaster top?"
I'm ignoring him. La la la la la la - I can't hear you!
Enough with the 'why' let's move onto the 'how.'
I own an Epiphone Les Paul - so I used that to trace the shape onto the body blank. In this post I'm just going over the first pass of creating the body outline. There are two steps when doing this with regular tools. I say 'regular' because the major guitar manufacturers have specialized tools that do this process in a few minutes unlike the below process which is measured in hours.
The first pass it to remove 90-95% of the excess wood. You can do that with a band saw, jig saw, or even a hand saw if you have that kind of time (I do not). The idea is to get close enough to the final shape that you can easily finish it (smooth it out) on the second pass with a router.
I'm using an inexpensive jig saw to remove all the excess wood. The process for a band saw is different (but as I don't have a band saw I'm not qualified to tell you how).
My process (stolen from somewhere online) is to make multiple cut-ins so that I'm making a series of small cuts. See the above picture for what I mean. I then cut along the trace-line with the jig saw - going from cut-in to cut in. It makes the process slower but much more accurate.
For the first build I did (the Tele) I just went around the whole body in one go - right up against my traced line. Let me tell you why that was a bad idea...
It's called flex. And jig saw blades have it in spades. If you try to make sharp turns, corners or switchbacks with a jig saw - you end up with ridiculously sloppy cuts because the jig saw blade bends as you cut. It's very difficult to keep it straight (or square). On the Tele I was very close to the line on the surface of my cut - but the back (or bottom surface) was 1/4 of an inch bigger or smaller. Because of that I had to modify the body shape a lot with the router. So now I do it this way.
What you see there (above) is not the top of the line tool for this job. It doesn't need to be. Take it slow and it'll be just fine. You may be able to see that I didn't go right up to my trace line with the jig saw cuts. That's because I'm not going to go that close to the line on this first pass. My goal is to get about 1/4 of an inch from the line and use the router to clean it up. It would probably be better if I got within an 1/8th of an inch - but I have a better router than jig saw - so that's how roll.
Well, what do you know. I think there's a guitar in there after all.
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