Picked up on an educated guess, advice? 67 Tele

Here's my issue with this idea...

The guitar with a little bit of work is a '67 Tele with a killer neck pickup and a flatter radius, unquestionably two of the most popular tele mods. A perfect Frankenstein player.


However, with no work to it, individually the parts have lost a lot of value. The dots, tuner re-drill, and veneer removal/flattening of the neck are a huge hit to the neck value. The body, well, speaks for itself. The neck pickup unfortunately lost it's decal which to many folks who buy them to make guitars original make it not an option so even as a pickup it's in the player grade arena where a guy like me would buy it (still worth good $$). Bridge and small parts from this era aren't crazy expensive or rare either. Lots of parts likes the pots/knobs were used on other stuff too.



IMO, again a little bit of work and a few parts could make this guitar worth more than the sum of it's parts as they are now. I'd get bushing adapters to fit the proper F tuners, drill out the dots for black ones, fix the body with the template like @Robmac showed earlier plus get a proper parch guard. Then, I'd go to Tom Bartlett's website and buy Royalite binding of the proper width, I'd route the ends and bind the guitar like a Tele Custom and paint it a solid color....customs are more attractive to buyers. And, if one couldn't do it themselves there's lots of talented people on TDPRI who I'm sure could help out.


Boom...'67 Tele Custom in a badass color (I'd go black) with a flatter fretboard and the best neck humbucker on the planet.

 

Here's Brent's super heavily modified '67 Tele in action:





Check out the Kahler whammy bar!


So much potential here.

 

If you are seriously considering putting that body back to the original shape (again why?) then I would perhaps seek help of someone that operates a numerical router. You have these small prototyping companies that own a CNC router. Talk to the guy who does the programming. They sometimes do some extra work in the evenings. You only need two perfectly fitting pieces of wood that you can glue on to the sides. The planing and cutting of the new body shape you can do yourself by hand. You only need the perfect (curved) glue seams.

 

Really, a good portion of the bodies width is still there. A couple bandsaw cuts and the surfaces jointed would mate up to new wood. You get the template, and cut around it, sand to the line and then do the roundover. You can see this kind of stuff in the Home Depot Forum on a regular basis.

 

I'd probably leave well-enough alone. If it plays and everything works correctly I would just give it a name and have some fun with it. Make people guess if it's real or not, then prove them wrong.

 

Right on! IF I had your guitar, I would repair the original body. I'd replace the dots on the neck too, and whatever else to bring it back to original spec. Other than that, I would totally put that thing back together, PAF and all, and rock on with it! A 67-68 TC with a late 50's/early 60's PAF in it??? Oh man... now that's the chit! Don't know how handy you are at doing the work but even if you send it out to have the work done, you're still going to be ahead IMO and end up with a heck of a guitar when done, and a heck of a story to go with it

 

I agree. If you want to keep the modded body for nostalgia purposes, do so. A nice new aftermarket Tele body can be aged/reliced to, at least, "match" the neck/hardware, etc... Cool find for 30 bucks.

 

E

Exactly. You can restore the original body back to its original dimensions for far less than what a good body would cost you. Plus the body you have fits everything you have already, so that takes the guesswork out of possible jackin' about with getting a new body to fit all the parts correctly etc. saving you possible headaches. You can get ash cheap enough and I would strongly encourage you to use ash, as any other species would not be correct for 1... and 2, pine etc. may react differently than the existing ash in terms of expansion/contraction, and you may end up with cracks in the seams/glue joints etc. over time. If you do it right, you can repair that body and it will be as though the mod never happened. Good luck and please keep us posted on your progress! I for one would really LOVE to see you put her back right, and play the snot out of her!

 

I posted this earlier but this is a repaired double cutaway that I did 25 years ago with a CNC router. You cannot get this accuracy with a table router.

 

Just going off the photos (which can play tricks!)




Looks like I see the veneer layer thicker on the end than the middle?





Versus here you can see the full thickness of an original veneer layer above the nut. A big problem with Rosewood boards in this era is techs of yore sanding them down to almost nothing when doing fretwork

 

I'd consider having the body restored by a reputable luthier. That way, the value of the end product would probably be better than if you just say "I did it myself". Higher cost, too, I guess, but still that makes sense to me.