New Warmoth Tele: Part III The Assembly

While waiting for the pickguard to arrive from Canada I decided to knock out some detail work. Shielding can be a controversial topic, but I recommend doing it and I much prefer using copper foil over some of the conductive paint products I’ve tried in the past. This is the cleanest job I’ve ever done. Tracing and cutting out pieces the exact size of the pickup routes worked really well. During my last build I also learned that it’s not a good idea to shield the route for the input jack. Skipping that also sped up the process.

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New Warmoth Tele: Part II The Finish

I’m a huge fan of the legacy of a company from the 90’s called Stephen’s Stringed Instruments. Stephen Davies and team created some really unique guitars and they are becoming increasingly difficult to come across these days. The old website is still up and I love reading the specs page. I really like his comments around finishes and this meshes well with my experiences.

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New Warmoth Tele: Part I The Goal & Sanding

While I very much enjoyed my first Warmoth tele, it was my first attempt at putting a partscaster together. Compared to some of my other guitars, it wasn’t holding up any more. I played the hell out of that guitar and felt pretty comfortable giving the neck & body away. I wanted a similar Nashville tele, but with a similar finish to the last one I built. I was so happy with the N4-ish Warmoth I put together, I wanted to see if I could recreate some of the magic with that guitar on a new one. I decided to hang on to the hardware and pick up a different neck & body.

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Tele Neck Refinish


I was so pleased with the results from refinishing my bass neck that I decided to do the same to my tele. This neck originally had a Tru-oil Gunstock finish on it that I sanded off. It was my first expieriment with finishing and it didn’t go very well. In hind sight, I think I may have bought a defective bottle. I remember the oil being more like a tar that was incredibly difficult to spread. Honestly this was about 12 years ago so my memory is not to be trusted.
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Tele Hardware Update

Over the past several years I’ve made several upgrades on my tele and I never took the time to write about it. I recently switched my saddles again and I figured now would be a good time to document this.

My tele started with a standard Gotoh tele bridge with modern “strat” style saddles. These bridges are excellent and it served me well for ~10 years. …until I played a Suhr tele w/ the Wilkinson (by Gotoh) WT3 bridge and it spoiled me. …a lot.

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