Building A Partscaster (Telecaster) Part 7 - Finishing Off

Introduction

With the wiring mostly done, the last stage was to add my chosen pickups, get the control plate mounted and fasten down the scratch guard. These should have been easy tasks, but that non-standard body was continuing to threw spanners in the works.

The control plate was overlapping one of the pickguard screws.

The Route to Success

After some thought, I took the decision to alter the body, as it's already been modified and repaired at the bridge routing. The control cavity would have to be widened on one side, but not having many woodwork tools, I wondered how best to do this. (chisel, Dremel with circular blade, drill loads of holes?)

I was sure most of the methods I had available to me would look terrible, so I ordered a cheap mini-router from eBay and a selection of router bits.

My new Katsu mini router

This isn't a review of the router, although I will say after a little practise on some scrap wood I was very happy with the results. I measured the gap from the edge of the router to where the cut was made and this gave me my offset.

Next I clamped a wooden guide onto the guitar body using this offset and a line I'd made on some masking tape to mark the new cavity edge. All I needed to do now was set the router depth, hold my breath and start cutting.

The body ready for routing

I had to do two cuts at different depths because the cutting tool wasn't deep enough, but this reduced load on the router and gave me more control. I took my time, being careful to avoid burn marks and to freehand the curved ends.

The completed routing (the black line marks the edge of the plate).

I also cleaned up where the cavity had been chiseled out to give the switch more space. There's not a lot of wood depth here, so I removed very little. I had to unsolder and pull the ground wires back before I started, and here you can see I've re-attached one of them.

The pick guard stills needs modification.

With the control cavity done, attention turned to the pick guard. The extended cavity now lines up better with the pick guard cutout, but it still needs modifying a little. I drew round the control plate with a marker pen and then used a rotatory file on my electric drill to rough it out.

The pick guard modification completed.

I finished off with a fine half-round file and re-checked that everything fitted well. The screw holes were then marked and drilled with a 2mm bit.

The copper shielding in place. (notice twisted pickup wires to reduce hum)

The body had been shielded with copper tape, so before finishing the electrical work, I replaced this with gardeners anti-slug copper tape. This stuff is quite cheap, I just cut off the serrated edges or trimmed down as required. I then applied a little plumbers flux to the stuck down edges and soldered all the pieces together. (They need to form one continuous cover)

The pickup mounting springs were replaced with neoprene tubing, and I found that a little bit of lubrication helped them fit over the pickup mounting bolts. It's a common modification that removes microphonic pickup noise, but I figured it was better to do it now. Then it was onto the socket.

Modern screw fitted output jack.

I'd read that you need a special tool to fit telecaster socket mounts, and while I liked the idea of being authentic, it sounded like a load of hassle. Most people seemed to be removing them and fitting these screw mounted sockets that don't go loose or wobbly. So that's another upgrade pre-fitted.

The final step was to solder the pickups and output jack onto the pre-wired control plate and ensure all ground connections were made properly. Screwing things back together before testing is tempting fate, so I plugged it into my THR5 amp and checked the wiring before buttoning it all up. To my surprise everything worked, those Seymour Duncan wiring diagrams were spot on.

The completed guitar body.

And here is the finished guitar, ready to be set up and played. Initial tests revealed a very trebly sound which was easily tamed by backing off the tone control. The series switch mode (in position four) had bags of volume and then the phase switch on the tone-pull really thins-out the sound.

I like it.

Building A Partscaster (Telecaster) Part 6 - Pickups

Introduction

The basic guitar is now working in an acoustic way and the control wiring is done, so it's time to move onto the pickups. There are a few design elements that create the "telecaster" sound, but the most important thing is the pickups. They have evolved throughout the years from Leo's original lapsteel pickup, to the modern noiseless pickups that are voiced to sound like they've come from the 1960's.

Ideally I'm aiming for a 1950's sound, but as I started researching, I became bombarded with specs that don't match up to what's readily available today. In fact, the more I looked into it, the more a minefield choosing pickups became. But what's so special about telecaster pickups?

Pickup History

The thing that's quite obvious on a Telecaster, is how unique the pickups are. There's that large pickup built into the bridge, paired with a smaller chrome covered neck pickup, which reminds me of the dissimilar size wheels on a chopper.

Telecaster Pickups.

The original tele was called the Esquire and it only had the bridge pickup. Leo's design used a copper or zinc plated steel base plate with alnico pole pieces and had a relatively low output compared to today's pickups.

The Fender Esquire Pickup

Bolting this directly into the steel bridge focused the magnetic field in a way that made the sound brighter. In fact the resulting sound was too bright and the guitar relied on a series of switched capacitor circuits to tame the harsh trebly tone. Together with its lack of truss rod, (which saw many of the first batch of guitars returned due to bent necks) showed this design to be little more than a stepping stone along the way.

The Bridge Pickup

The bridge pickup isn't too unusual at first glance, but there are two important differences. First it has that steel base plate, and secondly it uses the bridge as an integral part of its magnetic field.

Left bridge pickup, right comparison of magnetic fields.

Compare the bottom field diagram from a telecaster with the one above from a stratocaster. The concentration is clearly stronger, while the pole piece magnets themselves are about the same strength.

The Telecaster neck pickup started out with 43AWG enamelled wire (with a 10kΩ resistance) and soon switched to thicker 42AWG wire (with a 7.8kΩ resistance). They initially had alnico III pole piece magnets, but this was later changed to alnico V and the windings reduced to around 6 to 7kΩ. Standards were pretty loose back then, so windings on the coils could vary by hundreds of turns, and the pole pieces themselves weren't always guaranteed to be Alnico V spec.

The Neck Pickup

The neck pickup was added to the later broadcaster and subsequent guitars, and uses a smaller narrow coil with a metal covering. Typically the neck pickup is as described as "dark" sounding, while the bridge pickup is "bright", and this leads to good mix when the two are used together. The cover itself darkens the sound and it can be removed to open the sound up a bit, to the detriment of increased hum.

It's hard to say much else about this really. It's not uncommon for guitar players to swap out the neck pickup because they're pretty uninspiring, but as I've got no experience with them, my plan was just to get something typically telecaster and see how I felt about them.

What To Buy?

The more research I made, the more variation there seemed to be in Telecaster pickups. In those first few years of the 50's they changed so much, and then there was the changes into the CBS era. I read a lot of reviews, watched a lot of demos and still failed to make a buying decision. It didn't want anything 'hot', expensive, or particularly special in any way. But I had little to go on, other than I wanted alnico magnets rather than ceramic, and low output levels.

I nearly went for Tonerider Hot Classics, the price was reasonable and they sounded okay, but like most of the premium brands, they seemed to only offer slightly hotter versions.

In the end, I spent a very modest £17 on some unbranded alnico V pickups with coil resistances in the right ball park. I'm not a great believer in hype and it's unlikely I'll see any difference to the more expensive pickup sets with similar specifications (which I have no experience of anyway).

Cheap Alnico V pickups from eBay

So, here's what I bought, something not far from the 1955 spec, which should be bright and twangy. My plan is, they'll do for now and can always be swapped out later if I don't like them.

Building A Partscaster (Telecaster) Part 4 - The Bridge

Introduction

If you remember back in my first post, I mentioned the bridge pickup routing had been enlarged. I was hoping that the bridge I bought would cover it (and it does), but one thing that was really bothering me was that it seemed to be in the wrong place.

Comparing dimensions (Fender on the left)

I hadn't noticed before how the shape of the body differed from the Fender shape. Not only is it wider at the bottom, but the top left is less pronounced. The control routing is slightly higher, and you can see from the blue line that the bridge positioning is wrong.

This is probably going to make tuning and intonation impossible.

A Closer View

I was a bit annoyed, so I messaged the vendor on Ebay. He sent me photos of the old bridge he'd taken off it, and it seemed to match the one I'd bought. Maybe it will work, but until the neck had arrived I didn't know for sure.

The photo from the vendor

My bridge has the same dimensions and those mounting holes match exactly.

My bridge showing the measurement from the nut.

A few days later, the neck arrived and it became clear (with a neck scale of 25½ inches) that those saddles won't go back far enough. It might have had a shorter scale neck before, or maybe it was gooched and this explains why the donor guitar had been stripped for parts.

Not a huge problem you might say, just drill new holes and mount it in the right place?

Yeah, but that will uncover that ugly botched hole!!

Filling the Hole

There was no choice if I wanted it to work properly, the bridge has to be in the right place and I needed to replace the missing wood from the body. Here's the steps I took:-

1. Make a paper template.
2. Glue template onto pine block (soft wood is easier to work with).
3. Cut out and sand into a close fitting shape.
4. Remove copper foil from the hole and glue block in with PVA.
5. Repeat with a piece of thin ply with a similar grain to the body veneer.
6. Stain a golden colour (I used a mix of coriander and tea).
7. Apply four coats of varnish.

Left the completed body repair, right with bridge and pickguard fitted.

Okay it's not great, the resulting colour isn't quite right, but once the bridge and pickguard are fitted, most of it is hidden. In fact you have to look quite closely to notice it.

Fitting the Bridge

I used the "fit the two E strings" method to position the bridge, ensuring the strings sat in the right nut slots. I pulled the strings tight, ensuring the gap to the fret board edges is the same both sides and the bridge was square. It took me a few attempts before I was happy, so if you're doing this, double check before you start drilling holes.

Once that was done, I couldn't resist throwing some strings on and trying it out.