USA Custom Guitars Tele

This Tele started off as a one-piece USA Custom Guitars swamp ash body. I put a couple coats of sealer on it and sent it and another body (a single hum strat type body) to my mom to paint. She hadn't had a chance to work on them in a while so I asked her to send me back the Strat so I could experiment with swirl painting it. She sent back the Tele (ever try and describe guitar shapes to your mom?).

So I figured what the heck and decided to swirl the Tele instead. Holy crap. That turned out like sh*t. So naturally I sanded it down and tried it again. I *almost* got it. Of course at this point I had lost enthusiasm for the idea. So I was listening to Van Halen II and got inspired. That inspiration got me to Schucks and I bought a can of white primer, yellow, black, and clear paint. As it turns out the paint is pretty crappy but I did it anyhow. Of course the base coat that I originally applied is long gone and I didn't fill it or anything. So you can see the bumps of the grain of the wood. So I'll pretend I meant it that way so the wood can "breathe". Sure. So naturally I didn't wait until the finish really hardened properly before I put it together. The finish will need to be left alone for a while to harden. Basically I put it together as soon as the string ferrules came from Angela.com.  Patience I ain't got.

All together the finish work took me about 10 days from the last time I sanded it down to it's completion last night - so it took a little longer than it should have :-)

The neck is one of the 60's reissue necks from an organ donor Blue Flower Fender Telecaster. The pickups are Lindy Fralins with the extra ground wire for the neck pickup so I could easily wire it to the 4-way switch. Fender bridge and control plate from that same Flower Tele. The neck plate came from a Charvel Model 3 that was disassembled for organ donation. Electrosocket jack, orange drop cap, Fender 4-way switch, pots from Warmoth, and Nobease knobs.

9/18/2005 Update:

The guitar has been stripped and a pickguard was added.  The bridge was changed to a 3-brass saddle version from Giant Guitars with a notch for better finger picking access.  Oh, and the knobs are black knurled now.  Looks a lot better now, eh?