Building a Telecaster Thinline – The Parts Arrived

The parts came on Tuesday.  Everything fit together real nice.

The prototype was pretty much prefect…

…except for this gap between the body and the fingerboard.

The gap is for the pickguard.  My design doesn’t have a pickguard, so I needed to make the neck pocket deeper.  When I do this on the real deal, I’ll just change the CNC program to cut deeper.  I needed to figure out how much deeper and test it out.

I made a manual router setup.  I cut the template on the CNC router using the same toolpath as the neck pocket.  This is the first time I’ve done a manual router setup.

It worked…mostly.  The pocket isn’t as tight as it was before, but the depth is okay now.  It’s a little more than .75in deep now.  I am going to mount all of the hardware and string it up to check the effect the increased pocket depth has on the string height.