Slow ugly guitar build

Milk

For the first time in a while ive been without a guitar for weeks as it had to be sold to fund towards a car replacement. so needing a cheap guitar to get me by and also a excuse to learn along the way, in which I will be asking many questions to the more knowable members.

Onto the guitar. I have a telecaster body which I believe is ash and weight a tonne and a maple neck which says Harley Benton on the headstock, I can only presume the body is also, a friend used it to practice removing all the thick poly finish in which he did a shite job and the wood I covered in burn marks and deep grooves scraped into it.

the neck looks decent and straight but need to sort all the frets and nut

The electronics have all been crudely removed at some point so will be replaced.

hardware feels more like chrome covered plastic and feels cheap, soft and very brittle so will be replaced at also.


il get pictures up tomorrow but maily at this point coming up with a plan, advice and pricing it up.

tanihhiavlt

This forum used to run a challenge to fix up guitars for under £50 - hopefully there'll be some hints and advice to help

Milk

I’m been re reading them for ideas.

so far the basics are new everything, try make the neck playable and thinking re route it with a humbucker in the bridge and keep single coil in the neck and a switch to split it down,

Sesh

Regarding humbuckers in tele bridges: is the body string through or top load? When I did this the body I had was a top loader and at the time I could not find a top loading humbucker tele bridge so I had to drill for string through. Not easy without a pillar drill. 
A humbucker rout will still not fully cover the old tele single coil rout but it should be hidden under the new bridge but I'd check that if I were you. 

Milk

@Sesh the body is strung through but I’m to see if I can fit a half Tele bridge and hopefully make room for the humbucker .

Sesh

Ah, I used one of these:
http://www.axetec.co.uk/guitar_parts_uk_039.htm (bottom one). 

Milk

I see, so the pickup ring is build into the bridge similar to if it was to be single coil.

I’m looking for something with just the bridge bit with six saddles as it makes more sense than the 3 saddles currently and thinking about a way about mounting the bridge humbucker, end of the day the guitar is ugly so don’t need anything to fancy or nice 

BillDL

I'm not sure whether you are aware of this, but Harley Benton is an "own brand" of Musikhaus Thomann, the massive German-based music retailer.  They will have their guitars made for them by a Chinese company that probably makes own-brand and branded guitars for many other companies.  The brand is seen as a "starter" or "budget" range, but I own a few Harley Benton guitars that are pretty well made and are very good value for money.

The first thing to be aware of is that if the body is the Harley Benton one that the neck was originally attached to, the screwholes for the scratchplate and the scratchplate shape won't be an exact match for aftermarket Fender or Squier ones, so you would have to be prepared to buy one and hope that the holes for the pickups were lined up over the routed pickup cavities in the body, or else you would have to start removing wood.  If the scratchplate doesn't fit around the base of the neck and around the front of the bridge, you would have to hope that the cut out is smaller and can be enlarged rather than being larger which will leave a gap around the base of the neck, although it sounds like aesthetics aren't important anyway.

It sounds as though you are looking for a hard-tail "Strat" type bridge rather than the Telecaster style with the integrated pickup hole in the plate.   You need to watch carefully for whether the bridge is designed for "through body" mounting where the strings go into ferrules (sockets) embedded into the back of the guitar before coming up through and over the saddles, or "top mount" design where the strings thread through the upturned back of the bridge plate and over the saddles.

You should also be aware that there are different string spacings on different types and brands of guitars.  When you see "string spread" being mentioned, it refers to the distance between the centres of the two outside "E" strings measured where they pass over the saddles, and "string spacing" refers to the distance between the centres of each of the strings there.  The most common for that kind of guitar is a string spacing of 10.5mm which equates to a spread of 52.5mm.  If you still have the old bridge, that is your easiest way of measuring for a replacement.  You should also measure the height to the middle two saddles from the bottom of the base plate with those saddles set with the height adjustment screws set so they are just level with or maybe poking out a bit from the top of the saddles.  Fixed "Strat" style bridges with individual saddles are usually around 12 to 14mm, whereas some of the traditional "Tele" style bridges with the three brass saddle sections are usually a bit lower around 10mm.

If the neck is currently off the body, have you tried fitting it back to the body?  I ask this because if the screw holes in the neck have been mangled you will need to plug them with hard wood and redrill them a slightly smaller diameter than the screw threads and perfectly on line.  The same is true for the truss rod.   If the truss rod is going to be incapable of making the necessary adjustments you might not be able to make the guitar playable.  If the Allen socket is mangled (from using the wrong size Allen wrench) or if the truss rod has been damaged, for example by over-tightening, then it is probably hardly worth proceeding with the project.

Fret ends are quite easy to file off with the correct type of file(s) but it takes practice to avoid filing into the fretboard, which is more problematic and much easier to do by mistake on a lacquered maple neck than a "rosewood" type fingerboard on which file marks can be disguised.

Once you have some photos of what you have at your disposal it will help to draw up an action plan and a list of hardware.

From a personal viewpoint of somebody who has tinkered with guitars for over 40 years, if my pressing need for a guitar was caused by having to sell my only one, I would now be more inclined to buy one of the better quality budget-conscious guitar brands rather than doing up a battered one.  Your project is quite likely to incur as much expenditure for replacement hardware as it would cost you to buy a 2nd-hand Yamaha Pacifica, for example.  There are other brands that are good buys as 2nd-handers.