The original 1-piece cherry wood Tele body has been routed (the black areas) to take about 3mm off the depth of the body and then sprayed (which is why they're now black!) to create a contrasting area. Purely for looks (beauty is in the eye, etc) rather than any functional purpose. I've then sprayed the strip on the headstock with the same gloss black paint.
The neck p'up is now a mini humbucker. This replaced the p'up which was a bit weedy. I've also replaced the bridge p'up with a stacked single coil. Both new pickups needed some extra routing - the mini HB because the slot wasn't big enough, and some more depth in the bridge p'up cavity.
The 2 mini toggles are coil splits for the HBs. Yup, I could have used push/pulls on the tone and vol, or even used 1 DPDT mini toggle (I think), but I used 2 separate ones instead. I needed the soldering practice!The standard tone control will eventually be replaced by an active control, once I've enlarged the control cavity to be able to fit the active control's PCB into the cavity. There's no way it'll fit in the standard slot, not with all the 5-core cabling in there too. Obviously, there's also now a rear cavity to hold the 2 mini-toggles and the battery pack for the active control.
I also replaced the standard chrome cavity cover with a black one, and the output jack socket is also black.
Finally, round the back, the standard chrome neck plate is gone, I used the router again to create a recessed area around the screws (for router practice as much as anything!) and I've used 4 black screws to fix the neck on.
Total cost of ALL parts is around £85. Even if I add in the cost of the finishing oil and the whole can of black gloss spray paint, the cost is still under £95. The active tone control would break the £100 challenge limit, so it's lucky that I couldn't get it fitted in time. Maybe that's a job for next weekend.
In terms of time, I got it done over a couple of weekends, which I think is a pretty good return on time.
I also want to get some heavyweight strings (I'm thinking 12-52s) ... and I'm going to leave this guitar in open G tuning. It's going to be my Stones/Quo rhythm beastie!
