Lake Placid Blue Telecaster Set-up and Completion

The Lake Placid Blue Tele is done.  I've been away from the Dungeon for a while - my day job plus 5 days at music camp kept me away.  But now I'm back to the dozens of projects waiting in the wings.

You may have noticed (or not) that most stock Telecasters have plastic nuts that are way too tall.  This '50s-style neck does for sure.  I generally dislike hate plastic nuts, but I wanted to get this guitar up and playing.  So I decided to deepen the string slots and maybe shave some height off the nut and call it done.

You see in the picture above I'm using my newish Stew-Mac nut slot depth gauge.  I'm still coming to terms with it - usually I find my measurements are still a bit on the high side.  Which is not a bad thing, it just makes for more fine-tuning of the slot depths.

I have no idea what that last paragraph means!

This is One Good Reason to hate plastic nuts!  You can see the low E string side of the nut broke off when I went to file it.

Now I must make a nice new proper bone nut.  Which is not such a bad thing.

I'm leaving out all of the details, but I've written them out several times before on the blog.  This is the finished nut.  I used unbleached bone, polished up to 12000 grit and then rubbed out with swirl remover.  You get a fantastic finish on the bone.

This is what the proper slot depths of the nut slots should look like.  The wound strings are about half exposed above their slots, and the unwound strings are just even with the top of the nut.  The strings ride just a few thousandths of an inch (or a millimeter for that matter) above the first fret.  This makes a huge difference when playing low on the neck.

Those dark marks around the slot are just pencil marks - I erased them after this picture.

Aren't bone nuts wonderful?  I love them.

After the nut is done, I set the string action (height) and adjusted the intonation.

The Marc Rutters saddles work very well.  You just set the intonation on one of the string pairs, and then the other string should be accurate as well.

Here's a couple more Rutters bits I put on this guitar.  I have his Broadcaster knobs and this crazy beautiful knurled switch knob.  I've never seen anything like it.  It's beautifully made.

You can also see the very fine nickel-plated control plate (I'm not a fan of chrome), which features a slanted switch slot.  Wonderful parts.

Here we have the finished Tele on the bench.  I really like the Lake Placid Blue color.

I wasn't sure how the maple neck would work with the color, but I think it looks good.

Another shot of the finished guitar.  The neck is on the chunky side and it plays very nicely.