I’m eager to star the project, but I’m committed to taking an appropriate amount of time to do things correctly. In my case this means slow! I’ve jumped into research and design, heres some of what I’ve produced:

Design:

I decided to mock up the look I’m going for in photoshop (the base image is from fenders website, I photoshoped the pickgaurd). I landed on a fiesta red(ish) color, an lp pickgaurd that I saw online a while ago and reliced edges and hardware. I’ll cut the saga headstock to as much a tele shape as possible. Ironically I was having a hard time finding a good pattern image online and then I looked at the licensing agreement between marmoth and fender and it has a great tele headstock drawing in the PDF! I plan on using the stock hardware with the exception of new tuners and brass saddles in the bridge.

Logo:

I liked the angry angus logo. It honest in it’s appearance. I landed in between with my first name, Franz, in a Fender script. I used illustrator to create the graphic working from a photo of a tele headstock. I traced the F, moved the r, scalped the d to make an a, moved the n, and constructed a z by tracing a script font and “fendering” the edges to make it fit the design. It’s shown above in the header graphic, it’s a little rough but I think I have the right idea in place.

Research:

I started with the relic process, I found a great tutorial on youtube from howaudio.com and I took the $20 plunge to subscribe for a month to see the complete tutorial. Youtube also had several other relic tutorials that ranged in quality. HowAudio also had a good series on basic guitar setup.

GuitarAttack has several pages dedicated to TC-10 builds and I’ve started reading them picking up details on assembling the kit.

James Egold wrote a great artice in the September 2008 Premiere Guitar on building a Esquire clone “on the cheap” I found this article very helpful.

Heres a great site with info on fender finishes and custom colors.

Finishing is going to be a challenge. Fortunately I teach in a vocational high school and our auto body instructor is a wealth of knowledge. He was actually working on a cracked finish on a car when I went to ask him about technique for checking a nitrocellulose finish. Needless to say I’ll be talking with Mr. Holley in the future. I’m going to get a jumpstart searching youtube for a quick finishing “primer” pun intended.