Thinline Tele for Acoustic

[Ric Moore]

So I’m thinking about ordering a hollow Tele Thinline body with no routing that I can use to build a simple acoustic practice guitar. Going back and forth between ordering it with F holes or just drilling my own sound holes similar to a resonator type. I’m guessing if I asked Warmoth for the dimensions of their internal routing, they would tell me so I can miss structural parts.

I’m considering a 24.75 scale Tele or warhead neck. 

Question I have is...will the neck pocket need to be angled if I use a TOM bridge or something other than a normal Strat hardtail bridge with those neck choices?

 

[PhilHill]

Possibly, it depends largely on the height of the bridge used.  A straight edge laid on the fingerboard of a Tele would give you the distance from top to the line of the neck. You would want to keep the bridge thickness close to that... :headbang:

 

[stratamania]

You will need an angled neck pocket or a recessed Tom rout. Your use case will not alter the geometry in play. Here are the relevant references.

https://www.warmoth.com/Guitar/Bodies/Options/GuitarNeckPocket.aspx#Angled

https://www.warmoth.com/Guitar/Bodies/Options/BridgeRoutingOptions.aspx#TuneO

 

[Fat Pete]

This could be a cool project, but just to check - have you played a thinline Tele unplugged? They're not really hollow as such and not much louder acoustically than a solid body.

 

[Ric Moore]

Yes I have.  I play my Tele Thinline build on a regular basis and have two more in the build pipeline. I don’t like the thickness of typical acoustics and thought I could build my own with a body shape I like. I can certainly appreciate you asking though as you are correct, it is not the same robustness. I’m currently practicing some techniques by building a cigar box guitar from scratch.