Sam Weber Telecaster Project

Greetings one and all, it’s your friendly neighborhood guitar fixer guy back with another tale from the depths of the Bridge City Guitar tone mines. Today I want to share a project guitar I recently completed for my good friend Sam Weber.

In addition to being a masterful songcrafter, singer, guitar player, piano player, producer, and all around fantastic human, Sam is a tinkerer. I love working with tinkerers. Don’t get me wrong, the right-down-the-middle repair fare is fun, but when someone says “hey I want to do this thing and I think it’ll work but let’s put our heads together and make it cool,” all six of my neurons start firing.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, amidst visits with good friends, seeing Mr. Big play at The Fillmore (WOW), and failed attempts to take the ferry, I’m grabbing lunch in the Mission and I feel my phone vibrate. A few minutes later, I’ve learned that Mr. Weber has a heavy hitting gig coming up, the details of which I wouldn’t be privy to for a few weeks, and that he wants a special instrument to take along. I learn that he wants a Telecaster, but not just any Telecaster. This one would be a thin line (for some extra body resonance), have a single neck pickup, and would have a rubber bridge for the thud-tacular sound that Sam utilizes so well with his Stella from Old Style Guitar Shop in LA.

I’m sold on the idea from the jump, now we just need to source parts. A list is compiled of everything we’re gonna need, and Sam finds a Made in Japan neck and an MJT body from the most toneful reaches of the internet. Additional parts are ordered. Now, had I sent the parts order out a little earlier, this story wouldn’t have turned into such a nail biter, but alas…

Flash forward a week or so, and I’m home from San Francisco. T-minus seven days until the gig. Checking the tracking five times a day, I’m starting to wonder if this eagle is going to land after all. Sam has assured me that he could take another guitar with him, but I’ve been assigned to this task and gosh dang it I’m going to make it happen, even if I have to track down the mail carrier and promise to cook them dinner for a month if it means these parts get here on time. Sam has to fly out on a Monday night, and the parts all arrived at noon. On that same Monday.

I know I’m going to have to be in the zone to get this done in time for him to pick it up and make it to the airport. So I put on my scuba mask and dive in.

Here’s what I had before me (after a few hours of prep work):

Over the next few hours, this was to be the to-do list:

– Fit the neck to the body
– Make the rubber bridge (already begun in this picture)
– Enlarge the neck pickup route to accommodate the new humbucker
– Solder the new wiring harness
– Make a new nut and deal with an oversized and poorly cut nut slot (already half done in this picture)
– Mount hardware and assemble the guitar
– Setup and dial in for Sam’s preferences

Not impossible, but I don’t want to cut any corners here. I want to get it done, but not at the expense of quality. So I text Sam and tell him to wish me luck and that I’d see him on the other side.

There was one big issue that was going to massively inhibit the usability of this neck. At some point in its past, the nut slot had been widened significantly and not uniformly. The bottom of the slot wouldn’t be a huge problem to deal with, but the slot had been widened toward the bridge, meaning they had unintentionally shortened the scale length of the guitar. The net effect is that every fret is now essentially in the wrong place and the only notes that will play in tune are the open strings, while every fretted note will be unusable. Last time I checked, Sam likes to use ALL of the notes on the guitar, and luckily there are a few ways to fix this.

I could patch wood in to make up for the difference, but the glue up wasn’t going to be doable in the short amount of time I had. Thankfully I can always go back and do that later, and for now I can make a new nut that simultaneously takes up this gap and corrects the scale length of the guitar. Then later on, if we want to, we can just pop this nut out, fill the slot, and recut it properly.

In this picture, you can see the gap taken up by a little shelf of material – I was able to cut the nut into an L-shape so that the functional edge of the nut ended in just the right spot. Half of the width of the nut is at the level of the fingerboard. This was simply a matter of marking where the desired end of the nut should be and then filing the rest down with it glued into the guitar and the fingerboard masked off. Now the guitar would play in tune and I could rest easy.

Next up was to route the neck pickup. This went as expected, other than needing to expand the wiring holes to make room for a larger set of pickup leads. The leads on this Dimarzio were really short so I had to splice in some longer connections.

After that, I needed to make the bridge. Sam and I opted for a short trapeze tailpiece on here both for aesthetic and because I haven’t found a good way to rubberize standard tele saddles. I had never made a rubber topped floating bridge before, and I figured this look would be classy and easy to whip together quickly. The nice thing is if the rubber ever degrades, I can just pull it off and make a new bridge top.

The neck didn’t quite fit the body, but someone at some point had sanded the sides of the neck to make it fit in a different body, so I worked a little on the neck pocket to get a better fit.

At this point, this thing was about ready to go. After a test assembly, I could see the finish line.

This was one of those “forget to eat, forget to go to the bathroom” kind of days. Amidst the router trimmings, the piles of rubber dust, and the lead fumes, I felt time slow down a little bit and everything got a little easier. Then again, that may have been the chemicals. I let Sam know my confidence had grown that things were gonna be alright.

Safety first.

I could finally see a guitar shaped object coming into view. With little more than 25 minutes to spare, I called Sam and he blazed on over to the shop. He plugged it in, and after a few back and forths about the setup, we got it dialed, but there was one more thing to do…

Sam didn’t want the sticky feel of a glossy neck, so he said “toss me some 600 grit” and added the final touches.

The final product, on its way to its harmonic christening.

It was around this point I believe that I learned this guitar was going to be played with none other than songwriter behemoth Feist for a special taping of the eTown Radio show in Colorado. I believe my words were “HUH?!” So off Sam went, and as I was told, everything went swimmingly. But it would be a while until I got to hear just what he did with this thing.