I had the pleasure of carrying out the final assembly of a really cool project, a 24.75" scale Tele partscaster for Glen. He had sourced a body from Guitar Build (in the UK) and the 24.75" scale 'conversion' neck from Warmoth in the USA, some of the hardware such as a control plate with the angled switch slot, a nice modern 6 saddle Gotoh bridge, the Fender/Gotoh vintage tuners and a lovely matte black pickguard from friends at Armstrong Music. I was asked to carry out the final assembly, and whilst we had a bit of time on our hands whilst the neck was on order from the US, and Glen carrying out the painting work himself on the body, we chatted about some of the final details like pickups and wiring decisions. Which I'll of course share in this article.
The job was booked in, pickups ordered, Glen finished up his paint prep work and the time rolled around when it was time to get stuck in!
Glen had carried out some nice prep work, including installing his strap buttons, string ferrules in the rear of the body after he'd painted and relic'd it, and installing the tuners to his new Warmoth neck. He had also rounded the fretboard edge to his preference, along with of course his cool finish and relic work on the body in a cool automotive grey.
My first steps were mocking up the parts to inspect alignment of body, neck and hardware. Neck was a little bit too tight of a fit in the pocket for my personal liking. Nice of course to have a really good meeting of the surfaces, but felt this was a little too tight keeping in mind the possibility of general humidity expansion/contraction. So one area I'll work on a little is the neck pocket for a tiny bit more comfortable fit.
Unfortunately there were some hardware alignment niggles, but thankfully easily resolved with some measurement and re-working of the control cavity and pickguard. Upon mounting the bridge to the body's pre-drilled fixing points, I noticed that if I aligned the control plate in a standard position, the alignment would have been really bad. So I mounted up the wiring parts to the control plate, and figured out that the cavity itself needed to be opened up, to allow the plate to sit nice and straight/parallel to the bridge plate. As the control plate was also a slanted switch spec, this also meant it needed opening up a little on this ocassion anyway. So just part of the process for sure.
So with the plate to bridge measured and refined, I marked it out and had a look at how much wiggle room I actually had to be able to open up the cavity, whilst still have the plate cover it too. Close, but just enough for me to sort this alignment niggle out thankfully. So out came the router
The bulk of the material needed to be taken off was lower bout side, but I did need to remove a smidgen more on the pickup side, to ensure there would be space for the CTS full size volume pot. With the cavity refined, I could mount up the plate, get the bridge back on and look at the pickguard gap.
As you can hopefully see from the photo, the pickguards bridge cutout wasn't a great match for the location/alignment of the bridge on this particular body. I do believe, based on measurements from the bridge holes to the neck pocket, that the pre-drilled bridge location was ever so slightly out, not enough I feel to negatively impace string alignment or intonation, but enough to be visually noticable once you begun placing hardware on the guitar. So I marked out the measurements and ideal, even gap and got the router out again to refine the pickguard.
Much better, I hope you'll agree. Not refining that recess/gap would have been super noticable once assembled so always work sorting these kinds of things when you can during assembly.
Onto pickups and wiring to get the body finished up then! Glen decided on a really cool pickup combo, from two pickup companies I proudly stock and represent here. A McNelly T-Bar neck pickup in raw nickel, along with a Seymour Duncan Broadcaster bridge pickup. During our chats, Glen mentioned that he wanted to try and capture some familiar Gibson-esq tones as well as some classic Tele sounds too. The T-Bar is a P90 in terms of it's construction, it is just sized for regular Tele mount. Whereas of course the Broadcaster bridge pickup will more than capture those iconic Tele bridge sounds. Wiring wise, Glen originally mentioned the 4 way switching method, so we had the T-Bar made with this in mind (ensuring the signal ground was separate from the cover, and a dedicated ground wire from the cover itself pre-installed during manufacture of the pickup). As I also knew which pickup the T-Bar was being paired with, I could request that McNelly made the T-Bar with the suitable magnet pull direction and coil wind direction to ensure both pickups would be happy and in phase together in use.
Roll around to assembly time, and it was decided to have a series/parallel function via a push-push tone pot instead of via the selector switch. I used a CTS 450 series 250k solid shaft pot, an Alpha 250k push/push pot, a CRL 3 way blade switch, Pure Tone multi contact jack, a SoZo NextGen Mustard 0.047uF cap, and Gavitt 22awg wire. We discussed a treble bleed, but as Glen was already used to his Gibson guitars, which were wired 50s style, I suggested going that route, as the controls will work in a familiar way, and the natural sounding treble bleed effect will be found as a result of the 50s cap wiring method.
Glen also chose some cool MXR style control knobs along with a top hat switch tip from my stocked range here. Looks great and adds to the unique character of the project for sure.
The neck pickup was body mounted, for the cleaner/simpler pickguard look. This aesthetic does mean that if you want to adjust neck pickup height, you need to remove the pickguard, but not a difficult job I'm sure you'll agree.
The neck, as expected with a quality Warmoth item, was great. Also as totally expected with any replacement neck, a little fretwork attention is required, and goes a long way. I found a couple or so minor high spots, so refined those, and have them all a good polish up, board a good condition and got it ready for mounting up. One detail however that needed some work, by request, was the 22nd fret overhang. Basically if you order/select the Gibson scale option on the Warmoth site, there are some spec details you simply have to settle for. One is the heel side access truss rod adjuster, and the other is the fingerboard overhang. The truss rod adjuster could be lived with, as it is handy for small easy adjustments through the seasons, but the fret overhang was something Glen really didn't want to have to live with. It's not a fret he uses/needs, and visually makes things look too awkward, making the fretboard finish too close to the neck pickup for example. As the heel was standard, the overhang doesn't affect scale length or intonation, so it could essentially be removed. I started by pulling the last fret, and then used that fret slot line to remove the bulk with a fine saw, then simply worked by hand the last bit to match the heel shape. Gave it a good sand, and oiled it for a more factory looking finish. Worked out well, and does certainly look better on the guitar. The shorter scale and the extra fret overhang would have looked pretty cramped up, I agree.
The top nut was a pre-installed GraphTech item, so initial slots there ready for final refinement upon setup. I didn't grab any photos during the setup process unfortunately, must have been in the zone. But once I got the neck mounted up and carried out a string alignment, I felt it would benefit from a heel shim. So I used the great StewMac angled full neck pocket shim (a .25 degree one), which allowed me to raise the saddles to a better height to help ensure the grub screws were nice and flush. Something Glen had mentioned would be a bonus as he often rests his hand on the top half of the bridge during playing. Setup went great though, neck settled very well at string tension, and the guitar nice and resonant acoustically which is always a good sign. And an interesting thing for me being the shorter Gibson scale length. In all honesty, I suspect if you didn't tell people playing it, that it was Gibson scale not Fender, not many people would notice easily. I don't think there were too many obvious, or certainly any negatives, to the shorter scale. It felt and sounded very much like a Tele, and I suspect for those more used to playing Gibsons, this is the perfect Tele really. Just general hand placement, going from the upper areas of the neck back down to the lower frets would simply feel more like home to Gibson players, so I think it is certainly a viable option if that has been a detail putting you off Teles in the past. Cool guitar, some really great spec choices from Glen. A partscaster, custom project in the truest sense, every option chosen for a reason and it shows! Enjoyed working on it, and I hope the guitar brings many years of playing enjoyment!
Here's some more of the beauty shots to finish up the article.
James.
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