Telebration!

Dave Burrluck celebrates the first, and still the best, modding platform: the Fender telecaster

- Dave Burrluck

By the time you’ve got to these pages, you’ll have been treated to a lot of words and pictures about some of the most desirable Telecasters you can imagine. And while you can spend a pretty penny on a vintage or new Fender Custom Shop Tele and the like, the Telecaster’s brutally simple modular design – conceived for mass production in a factory, not in the workshop of a luthier – means that the Telecaster is a perfect platform for us DIY modders and kitchen-table makers. Get yourself a good body and neck and all you need is a little knowledge, a couple of screwdrivers and a soldering iron to create, if perhaps not the Tele of your dreams, one that’ll be more than functional.

Back in issue 432, I assembled a £118 Boston Teaser KIT-TE-10. To be honest, it was to prove a point that we don’t always write about guitars that cost £3k upwards. But with a budget that was pretty much as low as you can go, I was determined to put together a giggable guitar. As ever, I underestimated the amount of work involved, particularly having to cut a headstock from the paddle-head of the kit neck using only a G-clamp to hold it to the kitchen table and a fret saw. Maple is quite a hardwood, you know. There then followed plenty of filing, scraping and sanding – all by hand, of course. If I’d had a bandsaw, not to mention a sander, that job would have been done in minutes, while a pin-router jig or indeed a modern CNC would add accurate replication and consistency. But my slightly thinner Tele headstock shape is unique, imbued with quite a bit of sweat, swearing and elbow grease. All mine.

The downside of such an undertaking is that the cheap-as-chips DIY kit is hardly standard when it comes to fitting new parts. A Mexican-made Fender Tele – of which there are trillions on the secondhand market – would be a much better choice to start your project.