Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

They're knot kidding. I'm surprised that they are not offering Redwood.
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?


Who the hell would pay for a knotty pine body? Just go to your local home depot and get the cheapest pine you can and THERE YOU HAVE IT! I don't know how they can charge that much for such cheap wood, and I'm sure Stewmac is all CNC so no real labor costs anyways. Oh well if it is a success, they'll keep on doing it. The Clear Pine looks nice though.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the "modern player" yet. Fender has brought back the pine body for this model, it is made in China. It is a very tempting purchase, super low price. I enjoyed testing this one out, but opted to build a partscaster for about the same price.

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You can get these pine bodies on ebay for pretty cheap:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/FENDER-TELE...396?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item460ea8313c

The new MP Fenders/Chinese Fenders are actually pretty damn solid. I recommend people try them.
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

Not all pine is crap, Hoop, huon and bunya pine all will make fantastic guitars.
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

How many of you dudes have actually played a pine Tele? Honest question.

I have. They're pretty cool.

I wouldn't trade a good piece of swamp ash for one, but a nice pine body has a deep, plunky tone that really lends itself to a Telecaster vibe quite well.

It's a different tool and a pretty good one at that. Don't knock it till you've tried it.
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

DSC00193.JPG
One of my favorite guitars.
Built from a piece of old growth yellow pine that was 2in thich x 15 in wide.
I added the birch ply to the top to "pretty it up"
GFS mean 90 bridge, & a middle strat pup.
Not your traditional tele, but this b***h rocks:D
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

Don't knock it till you've tried it.

I think that should be said about ANY wood in an electric guitar. Many types of wood have been used successfully in electric guitars. I doubt the wood choices made by large manufacturers are based primarily on tone.
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

I made a guitar out of Parana Pine about 10 years ago (it's a very hard type of pine), thing sounded terrible, so thin!
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

Yeah I was going to say, G&L makes awesome instruments with sugar pine bodies. And thats from Leo Fender himself so the tried and rejected scenario sort of doesn't hold water.
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

I played a tele style guitar made from aus bunya pine yesterday. It sounded awesome and resonated well.
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

After trying pine, I don't think I'll ever use anything else for a build, unless that build is intended to be a historically accurate reproduction. For the sound I like, it seems to be the perfect wood. And when you use it, a 7-lb. +/- guitar is pretty much a given. My all-pine G&L Legacy (body and neck) weighs 6.8 lb. And the thin-bodied pine Esquire I'm building would be 6.5 lb. if it wasn't for the Kahler and Hipshot B Bender. Nice.
 
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Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

I checked guitar mill and they don't have the options I want. Any other suggestions? USACG and Warmoth are out. They don't offer pine.

stewart macdonald... they even have knotty pine bodies... golden age is the manufacturer. This is a pic of a build I did with a Golden Age/Stewmac Pine body.

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Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

I'll admit I have no experience with sugar pine specifically, only the soft pine you get at a lumber yard.

Were the original Tele prototypes built from sugar pine, or another kind of pine?
 
Re: Where's a good place to buy a PINE Tele body?

I'll admit I have no experience with sugar pine specifically, only the soft pine you get at a lumber yard.

Were the original Tele prototypes built from sugar pine, or another kind of pine?

TL/DR version: 1) Fender used multi-piece western sugar pine for those bodies. 2) They weren't technically Tele prototypes, but Esquire prototypes and early production Esquires. When they were produced, not even the Broadcaster existed yet.

Full version: I've actually put a healthy amount of research into those early pine Fenders, as one of my most anticipated projects is an accurate reproduction of one of the early model single-pickup Esquires.

There were two prototypes (one "Snakehead" and one that looked closer to what became the Tele), and about four dozen early production guitars made of pine. These were built over a period of about four months, from late winter to summer of 1950. The earliest ones had one pickup. But after hearing feedback from retailers and musicians, Fender decided that the model should have two by the time the N.A.M.M. show happened, so they designed the neck pickup and started putting them in. At this time the Broadcaster did not yet exist. The Esquire was the only model. That was the originally intended name for the guitar, and it had nothing to do with how many pickups it had.

After hearing more and more feedback after N.A.M.M., Fender decided to make a few more significant changes. The guitar was well received sonically, but people complained that it seemed a bit cheesy. It was decided that a more high-class looking finish should be used, and a translucent finish resembling some popular furniture finishes of the time was picked ("blonde"). Making the instrument looking classier with that finish was hard to do with pine, so ash was picked for its "better" grain. To make the guitar feel more substantial and less toy-like, it was thickened 1/4" to what we now think of as the standard Fender body thickness. The guitar was also renamed the Broadcaster, and the Esquire name was retired.

A few months later, after those changes were in full effect, Fender decided to recycle the Esquire name. It would be used on the entry-level version of the Broadcaster. From that point forward, "Esquire" meant a single pickup guitar. Broadcaster bodies were used for both models. That allowed factory or dealer upgrades to the dual pickup layout to be performed very easily. So sometimes you'll see an old two-pickup ash or alder Esquire, but it did not come that way from the factory. It was modified after purchase by the dealer, the factory, or the user – or possibly by the dealer before being sold the the first owner.

Now that I spent to long explaining the history, on with the specs. The variety of wood used on those first few dozen production Esquires was western sugar pine. The body blanks were made of as many as six pieces of 1x lumber (which as you know actually measures at about 3/4" thick). They were laminated top to bottom ("pancake" style) and joined side to side to make a 1-1/2" – 1-9/16" thick body blank. Imperfections in the wood were drilled out and plugged with dowels.

The paint used was not nitrocellulose lacquer, but a much more "plasticy" stuff, cellulose acetate butryrate. It was black, and thick, so the quality of the wood wouldn't matter. It was a carryover from their lap steels. At the time, Fender's lap steels got their color not from being painted, but by having colored acetate sheet laid on the top. The sheet was attached, then the entire instrument was sprayed with the cellulose acetate finish (clear). It's basically the same stuff that was used for photographic film base before the introduction of "Safety Film." It's also basically a sprayable form of what Gibson humbucker bobbins were made of several years later. This finish was abandoned along with the above-mentioned changes after the 1950 N.A.M.M. show.
 
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