This is a new project in which we are building a guitar that is similar in design to the Fender Telecaster(tm). The working name for this guitar is "The Twang machine." This one will have a body made up of three pieces of swamp ash with black walnut stripes, a heavily-figured birdseye maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard, gold hardware, and an S/H pickup configuration. The bridge pickup will have coil-splitting capability.

The Neck Now for some pictures of the neck as construction begins. I bought a really beautiful piece of birdseye maple at Global Wood Source in San Jose when I was down there last month, and started work on this neck almost immediately.
The Body The body is made up of 5 pieces of wood (well, 6. But we'll discuss piece number 6 later. I started with three fairly narrow pieces of 2" thich swamp ash--all right, they were scraps left over from a couple of bass bodies I had already made up. I located some 1/4" x 2" wide strips of black walnut, and glued it up into a body blank, then cut out the Tele body shape on the bandsaw. Piece number 6 is a piece of bookmatched 3/16"-thick Hawaiian Koa cut to the shape of a standard Telecaster pickguard. This piece was left over from a drop-top I made up for another guitar. It's inlaid into the top of the guitar body, and the result is shown below: