Father and son build

A router a few bits and a good template will go a long way if you want to save money and make your own bodies and necks. A band saw is helpful because you want the wood trimmed down as close to the final shape as possible to reduce tearout and wear on the router. A spindle sander would be great to have as well, though not required. As for neck shaping, it's a workout, but you can do it all with a good rasp.

There are countless other tools that are needed and helpful, if you're like me you'll build, get the fever, and keep building. So my advice would be to build as simple as you have the tools for now, buy any tools you need to get going and then spend the next few years building up more tools little by little. After 4 years of building I still have things that would really help me out to own, but I think I've dialed in just about everything I need.

Good luck on your build post some pictures as you go!

 

If you want to go a fairly easy road to success, you could buy an unfinished wood body, finish it, add a neck from allparts, Fender, Warmoth. Pickups and hardware from guitar fetish.

I bought an finished pine body from ToneBomb: https://www.ebay.com/usr/tonebombguitarparts All of the routing and machining was done but it needed sanding and finishing. They also sell necks and are pretty responsive to questions.

Guitarfetish (GFS) are well known for parts at a good price. I’ve bought several sets of tuners, bridges, switches and hardware from them. I did not like their house brand bent saddles but everything else seems good. Their Wilkinson produces are ecellent: https://www.guitarfetish.com/

Bezdez is a seller on EBay I visit from time to time: https://www.ebay.com/usr/bezdez

Stewart Macdonald are well known for excellent luthier products.

 

The sky is the limit on a partscaster. The one I'm building right now is going to cost around $350 in materials. But that's trying to source quality parts as cheap as I can. I'm not going with the cheapest parts out there, but there are no frills on this one. I just built 3 strats for about $450 each, the strat before that was closer to $1000 and the tele before that was around $750. I would scour places like Ebay, stewmac, warmoth, amazon, and any others. Build a spreadsheet and figure out every single part you'll need compare pricing and find out what you want and what it will cost. Dont forget to add shipping because if you order from 10 different suppliers to save a few pennies you're defeating the purpose. I always start with a spreadsheet to track my expenses. Then you can also keep an eye on what you've ordered and what you still need.

 

Hi Guys,

Good luck with the build. My 2 cents:

1. Body - Warmoth from their "In Stock" shop. One of the few places where you can see the weight before you buy. My personal favorite is light weight roasted swamp ash. You can have them finish it, too, if you don't want to do that yourself.

2. Neck - Best Guitar Parts. You can get a neck made for your specifics. Ask questions here for any of the specifics that you are unsure about.

3. Hardware - Many sources. My personal preference is for 2-pin Hipshot locking tuners. No fussy little screws. The other stuff you can get from many other places, but I recommend a pre-wired harness from Emerson Guitar. They use very high quality components and test things for balance, etc. Although the electrical aspect of a guitar is easy to wire up, there are quite a few options for schemes even using the same components with any of the options. That, coupled with quality control variations with even the most common components, like pots, can make the wiring frustrating.

Finishing wood is super easy with TruOil. If you can make this happen easily you might feel more comfortable with a more complex build next time around.

Tools: Drill, drill bits, screwdrivers, and a soldering iron. There are more specialized tools like jigs that help with tuner mounting, etc, but if you take your time and think it through, you don't really need them.

 

Mine worked out as follows:

I’ve got about $600 (Canadian Dollars) into my Telecaster. That works out to around $460 USD. I think it could cost less in the US though because there is a far higher level of supply and we tend to get crushed in shipping charges for bulky things like wooden bodies and necks.

Nice Tonebomb unfinished knotty pine body, Generic 9.5” radius modern C maple neck with rosewood board and medium jumbo frets. Great Tonerider bridge pickup and Twisted Tele neck pickup, Wilkinson compensated saddles & bridge, locking staggered tuners, TBX tone control, 4-way switching.

There is a recent discussion here about how much a partscater cost and was it worth it: http://www.tdpri.com/threads/how-much-did-your-partscaster-cost-is-it-worth-it.790373/