I’ve been playing acoustic guitar for years, but after playing my buddy’s Les Paul, I decided I wanted an electric too. My roomate and I decided build our dream guitars. This design is based off of Bruce Springsteen’s Telecaster. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of the build photos when my phone broke, so this will be a bit sparse…

Materials

Were ballin on a budget, (and I want to prove to my friend that you can make a guitar out of anything), so I’m using hardware store Poplar boards. Poplar is notoriously off-putting in color, but I found a guy who makes it look beautiful, and he was kind enough to share his method with me. I decided to buy a fully formed neck, because I shaped and fretted one in my bass ukulele project and oh man that was an ordeal… I bought the potentiometers, switches and wires as a kit with a wiring schema for a telecaster online. After watching my friend spend $150 on pickups, I decided to try my hand at winding them myself. This was by far the most frustrating part of the build…

Build

The build took the greater part of Spring quarter, mostly because I only had a free hour or two to build each week between track and Systems Programming… Still, it turned out in the end!

First things first, I cut my boards down, stacked them and glued them face to face to create a giant block. The board had a streak of green heartwood, so I stacked them in to form a pattern. I actually tried several different patterns, but I liked the one below the best. Then, I planed this block down to thickness and made sure that it was flat. I drew the guitar shape on it and cut it out roughly on a bandsaw. Then, I cut a precise template out of MDF, attached it to my blank, and used a router table with a 1/2” straight bit to take the blank down to the exact profile of the template. If I could go back, I would have spent more time getting the template EXACTLY how I wanted it, to save time sanding later. Next, I routed out the body cavities for my pickups and controls.

After the body was prepared, I set out to wind my pickups. I knew nothing about pickups before this, but after some research I decided that I wanted one 7k ohm and one 5k ohm pickup. With the copper wire that I used, this was about 6000-9000 winds. I absolutely did not want to do this completely by hand, so I rigged up a drill to spin the bobbin and ran the wire through a clamp to limit the traverse and keep it on the bobbin. Winding the first pickup took about an hour, because the wire kept breaking and I was too scared to go fast with the drill. Since I broke so much wire, I actaully ran out and had to order more. The second pickup, on the other hand, took only 10 minutes. The pickup winding station is pictured below.

Soldiering the pickups was a whole other thing… The wire is insulated and thinner than the average human hair, which made getting clean connections a pain. However, after several tries and some delicate unwinding, I was able to get two functioning pickups!

Since we had access to the laser cutter, we just had to sign our guitars. I wrote “Poly telecaster” on mine, and engraved the jumping fox from the pizza peel onto the back, where it attaches to the body.

At this point, all I had left to do was put it all together! That took a few hours, but, later that day I was able to plug in and play, and oh boy… All I can say is my neighbors next year are gonna have complaints…