I’ve built a custom guitar from a kit before, which was a great learning experience for how they are wired and how all of the components work together. In fact, if you are thinking about building a guitar yourself I’d recommend starting with a less expensive guitar kit to get yourself familiar with the process. This was my first foray into building a guitar body from scratch, and it is a custom telecaster. You can see the finished custom telecaster, along with the hollow body firebird we built from a kit in the gallery below.

This custom telecaster body was made from a solid 4″ x 7″ x 60″ beam of basswood. So I had to start by cutting off a 16″ length, which iIthen resawed on the bandsaw for two 2″ x 7″ x 16″ pieces. This left plenty of basswood left for another body or two. After jointing the edges and gluing them together it was time for planing down to to final 1 3/4″ thickness.

In order to get the shape of the body right, I decided to invest in a telecaster body routing template. This template gave me the body shape, the control and neck pockets, and the basic front pickup shape. This is where the custom telecaster body part started coming into play. If you know much about electric guitars, you’ll recognize that telecaster don’t have tremolo bridges, but that is what my son wanted. So now I decided to use a stratocaster bridge routing template to route this pocket. My son also wanted a humbucker pickup in the bridge position, so I used a humbucker template to route out this pocket. Of course, all of those changes weren’t enough, he also wanted a strat single pickup in the neck position. So I had to enlarge that cavity too, but I did that by hand with some chisels and a Dremel sander.

After I had the body all routed and everything was dry fit, it was time for lots of sanding before the painting process began. For paint, we decided to use a black gloss nitrocellulose lacquer, followed by a clear satin nitrocellulose lacquer topcoat. The objective was to stick with a vintage look and feel.

All said and done, this was a lot easier than I had originally thought it would be. Of course, there was lots of precision required, but all of the templates definitely helped from that aspect. I think the finished product actually turned out pretty good too. We did have to wind up using a 0.5° shim in the neck pocket to get the neck angle right. I’m certain I could have sanded that angle out, and I may at some point in the future, but we were too excited to try it out. At this point I’m anxious to build my next custom stratocaster body with some of that leftover basswood!

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