Telecaster Two - 6 - A Busy Day

It's Saturday so I started early and spent most of the day working on Telecaster Two.  First job of the day was to finish routing out the truss rod channel.  It didn't take too long and by lowering the router bit a mm at at time I was able to get a perfect depth and a nice tight fit.  I chiselled out the cavity at the adjustment end as it sits slightly lower and is wider.

Once I was happy with the truss rod position I decided to glue the fingerboard on to the neck.  Never enough clamps!

Next order of business was to cut out the pine body shape from the blank.  The jigsaw was the tool of choice for this (in the absence of a band saw!).

I stayed a couple of mm outside of the line and then trimmed the edge flush with the router using a bit with a bearing on it which rides round the template which I screwed back on the the body once I had cut the Telecaster shape out.

Thankfully it has been a nice day today which is great because I can do all the cutting and routing outside.

After I had routed the edge flush with the template I attached the cavity template.  This calls from some serious routing and some serious mess!  It didn't take long to route both cavities out with lots of pauses along the way to vacuum up the sawdust.

Beautiful and so much more lighter that if I left the body solid.  I plan to use two P90 pickups and a tune-o-matic bridge and tailpiece.  I'm still pondering how to attach the controls, should I use the traditional telecaster control panel, have the controls mounted to the front of the body with a rear access panel or fir them to a bespoke Stratocaster-ish pick guard?

I picked a Piece of MDF oak veneer I had laying around in the garage and then used the jigsaw to cut out the Telecaster body shape.  I will route the edges flush to the body once it has been glued on.

This is the first time the front, back and neck have all met each other! There is not much to look at in terms of grain pattern on the front of the body however It should still look nice once it has been finished and polished.

I learned a lesson building the first Telecaster body... Cut out the f-hole (or may version of an f-hole!) before your attach the front the the body.  Otherwise the jigsaw blade is too long and it catches on the inside of the body!

I carried on working into the night, mainly on the neck ensuring the profile of the neck was OK and then I marked out the fret positions on the neck.  More to come tomorrow hopefully.