Teisco Project Guitar

Here's a guitar I put together. I bought the cool Teisco archtop body and the Aria neck on eBay. The body is hollow throughout (unlike a Gibson ES335), except for a central post. Therefore it is very lightweight and has a nice rich acoustic quality.

The neck was undrilled new old stock, and has real pearl block inlays. Both were in very good shape. I had to shave the neck down to fit, plus add some shims to angle it back to get the desired action.

The hardware was purchased from Stewart Macdonald: adjustable archtop bridge, chrome tailpiece, misc pots, knobs, etc. The bridge slid about 1/8" toward the neck while the glue was drying so I can only get it to intonate with light to medium-light strings, which is what I use anyway.

The trickiest part was the pickup. The body had originally had 3 single-coil pickups, whose holes had been filled with wood putty. They had been surface-mounted. I didn't want to cut the body so I needed a surface-mounted humbucker. With only 3/4" spacing between the body and the strings, the first pickup I got (a Seymour Duncan Little '59) didn't fit. I got Kent Armstrong to make me a thin humbucker with 12 adjustable polepieces in a surface-mounted configuration. It worked perfectly, and sounds great.

I later added an internal homemade piezoelectric pickup for additional acoustic tones. This is an interesting and inexpensive modification which can be applied to any guitar.

You can see where I painted a black sunburst to help hide the markings where the other two original pickups had been.

My local guitar store (Music Box, in Bermuda) happened to have an old case which was originally for an unknown bass guitar, but which was a perfect fit as you can see!