Fender Telecaster 1983-87 Veneer

My dear, departed beautiful brother gave me this guitar a few years ago. He hated it. It was very different then. It was basically a great Telecaster, made in Japan no. E835005, Maple neck with Rosewood fingerboard and an Alder body. Unfortunately it had been seriously abused by persons unknown and my brother had planned to one day rescue it himself. He had far too many other commitments, however, and when I returned to Salford after 40 years away he passed it on to me as he knew I had always wanted a Tele. He was a good bloke. The tele was covered in green glitter paint and the fingerboard radius was more like 7.25" than the expected 10" and the frets were badly worn. The bridge pickup was a nice Seymour Duncan that showed a resistance of 8.19ko but the neck pu was unidentifiable with flimsy wires coming out of it like a tesco reject so I replaced that with an SD STR1 Vintage copy of the 1954 Tele neck pu. I bought a Gotoh GTC202 String through Bridge with steel saddles. I had a Stewmac Golden Age Alnico V P90 Modern 5415 Neck pickup lying around waiting for somewhere to be so I stuck that in the middle of the two SDs. One slight problem. All three were South Up CCW. So I flipped the magnets on the P90 and swapped the hot and earth leads on the SDs. This gave the required configuration to cancel hum in position 2 and 4 of the 5 way Schaller Megaswitch Version S which I wired up to give neck, neck and middle, middle, middle and bridge, bridge.  I then plugged the top of the channel from the neck pocket to the control pocket with a piece of Ash and dug out a pocket for the P90. I nearly forgot the truss rod cover, carved from 2mm Steel so all you have to do is unscrew two short screws when the situation calls for it. Much better than undoing 20 screws to remove a scratchplate or even taking the neck off. I do love Leo but mate, there are limits. The binding was rancid for some reason so I chamfered the edge of the body front and back. The back I painted in a bikini pattern using my favourite D520 colour scheme while the front was treated to a Rising Sun style veneer pattern which I adore.The lot was then sealed and Melamine Lacquered and left to hang for a month to cure. I fed the bridge signal through the Tone pot because I just like it better, and the P90 I wound as low as possible to give the other two a chance volume wise. Then I bought a set of Fender Poti Vintage White Bassman Blonde control knobs from Thomann. Gorgeous. The two tone and one volume knobs on the original Chrome control cover look fantastic. I had to make a new Jack Socket plate because I really hate the sunken ones that don't allow even the extended periscope jacks to seat properly. And I always use periscope jacks.
The fingerboard I sanded to a proper 7.25" radius as I had no choice without replacing it completely. I measured the fret slots and came up with 0.024" so I checked with Tonetech and found a Sintoms 18% Nickel Silver with a tang of 0.6mm. Near enough for jazz. The really odd thing though was the wire had a triangular profile. Never heard of that before. I was in an adventurous mood so I went for it. I put them on and am happy enough for now. I can always change them if i want but I might give them a proper chance. I prefer 12 to 56 flatwound strings which makes me a weirdo anyway. The very last thing to do was to prevent slashing my wrist on the teeny tiny allen screws poking up through the saddles. I thought of grinding them to length so they didn't protrude but that seemed a bit brutal so I made myself a version of the Fender P bass pickup guard out of some very thin brass which I folded over to give me a safe front edge. This works a treat. I did think of buying an Ashtray but that was more cover than I needed. The restoration was complete. I put the original tuners back on the headstock and off we go. I wish I had done this when my brother was still around to play it. He might have even got to like teles, well maybe a bit.