Building an Electric Guitar
Recreating a Fender Telecaster
There’s a certain mythology that grows around electric guitars. B.B. King is inseparable from his Lucille, just as The Fool, Brownie, and Blackie each conjure an Eric Clapton of a different era. Would Rory Gallagher still be himself without his aged Fender Stratocaster and its stripping paint? Yet an even greater mysticism surrounds such guitarists that play guitars crafted and perfected under their own hand. Foremost in this category is Brian May—Queen’s guitarist—and his guitar, the Red Special.
I am no Brian May, of course, neither in musicianship nor in luthier abilities (nor, I should add, in academic accomplishment—he holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics!), but the opportunity to build my own guitar was too seductive to ignore.
Over the past few months, I built my own guitar inspired by the classic Fender Telecaster. As the lab component of Harvard’s Applied Mathematics 141r: Computational Music Theory, each student was provided with a modest budget and tasked in creating their own pitch-driven instrument (that is, rather than rhythmically-driven). I paired up with my friend Nishant Kakar—thus doubling the project’s budget—and began.
Through the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, we were given access to work with a wide array of machines to accomplish the project: traditional woodworking power tools, laser cutters, 3D printers, and CNC routers were all available for our use. With this in mind, we set out to create the guitar!
Design
There’s a reason why the Fender Telecaster was the first commercially successful solid-body guitar. With its simplicity in design and unique sound, the Telecaster bucked trends and revolutionized music. To this day, the Telecaster’s twang and its mellow, warm tones are prized by guitarists. Its classic design uses a single cutaway and was created for mass-production: the body is routered from a slab of wood rather than assiduously carved by hand; there is no contouring; and the guitar neck is detachable from the body. In other words, it was the perfect model for a first-time guitar-building project.
Prototype
To use the CNC router, we searched for CAD files that we could then modify and adapt for our CNC router software. However, we wanted to first ensure that the dimensions and proportions of our files were correct before we used them on expensive wood. As such, we flattened the 3D CAD files and laser cut foamcore for a flat prototype of the guitar design.
The resulting product proved to be the correct size, thus validating the accuracy of the CAD models. It was time to leave the flat world!
We imported the CAD files to the CNC router software and created the paths that the router would follow to cut out the guitar body. Then, to confirm success, we used the CNC router to cut a prototype of the guitar body out of foam.
Final Guitar
While some claim that the type of wood has a notable effect on the tone of an electric guitar, the decision process for this build was purely pragmatic: the design for the Fender Telecaster calls for wood 1.75 inches thick, and the only wood of that thickness that the local Rockler store carried was mahogany. However, since the board was not of the requisite length and width, we bought two pieces to glue together.
To ensure a perfect fit, we used a jointer to level an edge on each of the boards until they had a smooth fit. After drying overnight, we sanded off the excess glue to prepare the board for the CNC routering—the body blank was finished!
The routering of the guitar body proceeded similarly to the routering of the foam, with a few exceptions. First of all, we modified the speed to ensure that the wood was cut evenly; after all, a hardwood like mahogany is quite different than foam. We made a test oval cut to ensure that the speeds were appropriate and that the cuts were smooth and did not damage the wood. Second, we also added options to drill the string holes in the body, a step that we had skipped for the foam prototype. This step proved to be challenging; the thickness of the wood resulted in some minor burning. Fortunately, the bridge of the guitar covered the aesthetically displeasing result.
Then, the main event: the routing of the body cavities and the guitar body!
The rough guitar body was complete, but before final assembly, it had to be transformed from raw, dull wood to a polished lacquer.
To ensure a smooth body, we proceeded to sand the body, with progressively finer-grained sandpaper. As necessary, we cleaned the wood with turpentine to remove the sawdust generated from sanding, helping prevent any scratches on the body.
Mahogany is an open-grained wood, so before proceeding to add a topcoat to the body, we used grain filler to fill the pores of the wood. Neglecting to do so would result in an uneven finish, with the wood’s texture coming through; however, we wanted the guitar to have a smooth finish. We sanded the guitar one last time to ensure the grain filler was flat and ready.
We used General Finishes’ Arm-R-Seal Oil and Urethane Topcoat, a semi-gloss topcoat made with urethane resin. I applied this topcoat slowly with a foam brush, waiting for each layer to dry before applying the next one. Once the guitar felt smooth and had a nice sheen, it was finally ready for assembly!
The first step for assembly was gathering all the parts: the guitar body, the pick guard, the neck, tuners, bridge, single-coil pickups, knobs, plates, and electric components.
Guitars, by nature of being connected to the electric grid, are often susceptible to a hum. This can be caused by many factors, including electromagnetic interference (EMI). Fortunately, this can be improved by lining the guitar’s cavities with copper foil to create a Faraday cage.
(Interestingly, another effective approach to buck the hum is by using two pickup coils that are wired out of phase—an approach famously used in humbucker pickups!)
For proper intonation, it is imperative that the neck be aligned properly with the body. This would ensure that all six strings reach their midpoint at the 12th fret. To accomplish this, I used twine attached to the top of the neck and the middle of the bridge and ensured that the string ran through the center of the entire neck:
Once the neck was aligned, I bolted the neck onto the body to set it in place.
One final step remained: going electric! Using the wiring diagrams provided with the pickups, I threaded the wires from the pickup cavities to the control cavity, soldered the wires to the pickups, three-way switch, the pots, the capacitor, and the output jack, and the electronics were set!
Then, I screwed the pickups and plates in place and ensured all the cavities were properly covered. I opened a fresh set of strings, strung the guitar, tuned it…
…and finally, after a long night of working, and strumming some power chords, the guitar was complete!
