Partscaster Telecaster | Just Wood and Strings

1964 Fender Telecaster Clone – The Guitar that Started it All

If you’ve read my “About” page, you’ll know that this was the first guitar that I built. It was a labor of love, something that I’ve always wanted to do, and I finally got to see it become a reality.

Here’s the story:

I began playing guitar in middle school. It was a documentary on Jimi Hendrix on PBS that really sparked my interest. I wanted to play an electric guitar (and specifically a Fender Stratocaster) so bad! All I had at my disposal was an old Stella acoustic that my parents had hanging on the wall for years. I took it down and started to learn.

Fast forward about a decade – I had played guitar in the jazz band throughout high school and was onto bigger and better things. I joined up with a few friends and we formed a cover band. It was fun. It was wild. We were good. At that point I owned two guitars – a Fender American Standard Stratocaster and a Taylor 310-ce acoustic. It’s embarrassing to say now, but I really didn’t know much about guitar upkeep back then. In fact, I had to bring my electric in to the local Music-go-Round to have it set up once a year. But I’d always been curious about what makes a guitar play and sound nice. More importantly, I wanted to build one on my own.

The year was 2017, a lot had happened since my band days. I had a wife and three kids now and not a lot of free time to practice or play at bars until the wee hours of the night. However, I wanted to reconnect somehow with music – I missed it. And I finally figured out a way to do so in early 2018. That fantasy football season I was in three leagues and in first place across all of them (humble brag). I was lucky enough to win the championship in all three leagues and as a result had about $500 to play with. So I set out to source all the parts for the guitar:

The parts

It started with the body. I found someone on eBay that would carve out guitar bodies and decided that I would be doing a telecaster. I picked it for a couple of reasons:

I was new at this and it seemed easy given the two-pickup configuration, and
I had always wanted a telecaster.

So I did the research and found out that Leo Fender used to make many Telecaster bodies in the 1960’s from ash. Soon, I had a brand new ash Telecaster body on the way to me.

Now, for the neck. The neck is, in my opinion, the most important thing for a guitar. You need the frets spaced just right, the fret height just right, and the angle just right for the guitar to sound and play well. So I did more research and landed (at first) on a Warmouth neck. I found it on Reverb and it too was on its way shortly after. (Fast forward to the end when everything was finished: I decided I wanted a maple fingerboard instead, so I found a B. Hefner neck on eBay and that’s what you see in the picture).

Pickups were next – I searched and scoured for just the right pair and ultimately found what I needed on eBay. A nice, new set of Fender Pure Vintage ’64 Reissue Tele pickups. The Pure Vintage line is built in the exact same way and with the exact same specs as the year it is reproducing. Pretty cool, and these things sound sweet.

Now for the hardware – lucky for me, my neck came with quality tuners. Schaller locking tuners to be exact, so that was taken care of. However, I did need the various parts and pieces needed to put this thing together. On to Amazon! I found everything I needed at this lovely place, and Amazon was very competitively priced:

The last piece to the puzzle was paint. I was a bit naïve and wasn’t sure if I needed “special” guitar paint. Spoiler alert – you don’t. However, I went over to StewMac.com and got high-priced grain filler and a few outrageously expensive cans of spray: 1) sanding sealer, 2) primer, 3) black gloss spray paint, and 4) clear gloss polyurethane. Hindsight being 20/20, I could’ve saved a few bucks by just going to the local hardware store.

In any case I had what I needed to build my first guitar!

The Process

When I say I built a guitar, I guess I really mean that I assembled a guitar. And assembly was very easy: All of the routes were in the right places and the neck and hardware fit with no issue. The hardest or most time consuming part was painting the body.

There are several steps needed to finish a rough body that you get off of eBay; the first is sanding. A lot of sanding! You need to do a ton of sanding to get all the imperfections smoothed out. First you rough sand with ~200 grit sandpaper, then you fill the grain with grain filler and sand again. Slowly but surely, you work your way up to 400+ grit for a nice smooth finish. Then its a coat of sanding sealer, then sand, then another coat, then sand, etc. etc.

Once I finally got to primer, I felt like I was in the home stretch. 2-3 coats to fully cover and then on to the paint. At this point you can go one of two ways: you can either take your time and buff/polish every few coats to get a nice polished look, or you can go for an “open grain” finish look. I was far too excited to put together this guitar and too the shortcut approach of the open grain look.

The result

All in, I built/assembled a guitar that plays and sounds great! The pickups are killer, this is a very versatile guitar – can really be used for any style of music. However, ash wood is HEAVY! Like, really heavy. It’s great for tone due to it’s density, but you’ll throw your back out if you have to lug this sucker around for a whole show.

My biggest takeaway was that there is a market (a big market) out there for guitar parts. And this process is what jumpstarted my journey in this niche.