72 RI tele custom

[stingray_65]

HI all!

I've been off here a while working on building my son a new guitar.

It has been a 3 year project that started out as "Let's build an amp and a guitar"

Well we decided to build the amp first, a 5E3 of course and I got hooked on the amp building :)

In the mean time we've been collecting parts for the guitar, slowly, but got great deals on all the parts by being patient and having a distinct goal.

When the neck finally arrived we realized all that was left to get was string trees and tone caps!

Here's most of the parts all laid out, we thought we could use a few old bumblebees of that board, but the values had drifted so far we didn't dare trust them. Not pictured is the bridge which we couldn't find because it was in my back pocket.

The neck is a WD Modern Vintage we ordered made to spec with quarter sawn maple and ebony fretboard. It features a compound radius fretboard, stainless steel jumbo frets and 3 bolt micro tilt. Because he has such long and dexterous fingers (like a pianist) we ordered the SRV neck profile wich is REALY heavy on the bass side of the skunk stripe and wicked narrow on the treble side.

The body is a MIM 2002 72 RI. It turns out we needed to remove 1/32" from the heel for the neck screws to align properly.

The neck pickup is a Fender WRHB bridge pup from a Thinline RI. We had listened to many clips  of Customs, Deluxe's and Thinlines and had to agree that they werent the clearest sounding pickups, but he loved the bridge pup when he played a Thinline at Guitar Center, so why not! it's his ax!

The bridge PUP is of unknown origins, I suspect it's a MIM as metric screws fit it.

The pots are all CTS, the switch is Switchcraft as is the jack, the tone and treble bleed caps are 225P orange drops.

The bridge is a Fender 3 saddle with the lip cut away partialy above and below the pickup.

All the rest of the hardware and pickguard is genuine Fender replacemnt parts.

The tuning machines are Schaller Fender script modern and because of a wrong click when we ordered the neck, I had to make a guided reamer and step ream the headstock to accept them

We added the decal for fun, we felt no one would really confuse this with a real fender neck because of the ebony fretboard with no inlays and we'd never intentionaly misrepresent what it is, we're both proud that it is a parts caster and the work we've put in to it.

The neck has about 15 heavy coats of nitro lacquer and block sanded from 800 grit down to 2500 on the headstock. The neck back we sanded down to 2500, but we resanded it with 1500 because that's where it felt fastest, finer than 1500 and the neck was sort of grabby and sticky because of his sweaty teen hands.

[stingray_65]

SO!
Here it is on the bench getting assembled, My son there is drilling the new PG holes.

stinging it up

and here he is breaking it in.

 we still have to get the set up perfect, it's unbelievable how low the action is now  and between the vintage saddles and the micro tilt we think we can go even lower yet. He can not stop marveling at how fast it is and how it is so much easier for him to chord because of the odd neck profile.

The neck pickup has a great jazzy flavor and plays suprizing well into the 5E3 for a humbucker (we'll mod the deluxe's cathode bypass cap later) and the bridge pup is decidedly tele with great twang and more heat than we expected!

The sustain is a little weak, It's my understanding this is typical of microtilt necks, but then again with his style of playing it really doesn't become a factor