Thanks for checking out this chambered korina troublemaker-type telecaster body WITH ISSUES. If you buy it, God bless you, but no returns—read on you’ll see why.

It weighs 5 pounds and 4 ounces.

I spend an absurd amount of time on this—there are about 30 coats of tru-oil and if you don’t inspect it carefully it looks amazing, but…

The worst thing is the neck pocket. The worst-worst of it is this: I was dremeling it out to install a neck with a truss rod wheel at the base of the heel when the bottom of the body/heel area cracked. I put the pieces back with super glue and sawdust so it should be solid (though it’s stupidly thin). And from the top it actually looks ok. But it’s objectively bad.

The other worst thing about the neck pocket is that it’s not quite routed right. At least, when I was trying to push a Fender Elite strat neck into the pocket, the heel of the guitar neck was a ch too wide. I was widening it with the Dremel micro by micro and trying to push it in…that’s when the thing broke. That being said, maybe my Fender neck is the wrong size? Seems improbable. I had it within about a milimeter when it broke, so it’s totally possible to get a neck to install properly, and once you do, it will look awesome. Especially a neck with a truss rod wheel.

Next issue with the neck: a 2-part thing about the reverse of the heels of the neck. First, it’s shaved down for better access to the high notes. Therefore, PLEASE be careful to not use a full-length screw on the shallower parts. I’m including screws and washer-things that will fit the guitar and not go through the fretboard of the neck. USE the correct ones in the correct order!

The second part of that is: the holes are drilled in an arbitrary location. That is, if you have a fender elite or ultra neck that’s already drilled, the holes won’t line up. Maybe it’s correct for a Charvel or something, but I doubt it. So, almost certainly, you’ll have to drill new holes in your neck. Any standard strat or tele neck should work (with some attention to the cavity as mentioned above)  BUT if you want to use a neck that’s already drilled, one of the holes in that neck is going to be visible where the corner is carved down on the body.

So many issues!

Next: The original HHH pickup routes weren’t aligned properly, so I carved the hell out of the body with a chisel. I got them aligned BUT I had to put a Lollar Wide Range in the bridge position to fill the space. With a wide-range ring, it covers the cavity. It would *probably* also work with a massive 3H pickguard if you wanted to build one, but if you do, measure everything first because the treble pickup cavity is oversized.

And: there is a crack in the back/base of the body BUT that happened very early on and I injected it with titebond glue so it’s very unlikely to get worse. You can’t see it unless you look for it, but if you do look for it, it’s ugly. As I said, this thing broke my heart.

On the plus side, aside from cosmetics and the work necessary to align the neck, this could be an awesome guitar. I was going to do Peter Frampton style wiring. I actually had it all set up before the neck went awry. I’m including the switchcraft switch, all wired up to 4-channel cable (the bare ground is in there also, but you don’t need that. The way I had it set up, all the pickups went to the main control cavity, and then the 4-wire cable took 2 hots to the switch and brought back the mixed signal from the switch along with the ground for the switch. This was my solution to the problem that the wire channels were too narrow to run two pickups up to the switch and then a hot and ground back. If you’re still reading this, this will probably make sense…

So that’s the story. If this is the project for you, bid high and often!

And keep it rocking…