I've had the parts for this build for a few years, but other things have always got in the way.

My old keyboard player, Dave Boland, wanted an electric guitar he could also play some acoustic parts on for a few numbers in his current band.

So he bought a Mexican Tele from eBay that had been severely bashed about in an attempt to fit some Graph Tech piezo saddles to it. The body wasn't worth saving, but the neck was OK and it seemed to have most of the required Graph Tech bits. But it didn't quite have all of them, and this was probably the biggest factor in me progressing with the build.

I found a Tele body on eBay that looked OK. It had what I thought was a 3-4mm thick flamed maple top, stained black. The routs were very roughly done

So the first job was to sand the maple top back a bit to reveal enough maple to stain and leave the top looking popped. Except that it wasn't a solid top, it was a veneer with a black binding. The black top and binding matched so much at the edges that I thought it was a thickish top and I'd been lucky in my purchase. But it was veneer, and the veneer was very thin (probably sanded back by the original owner) and before I'd sanded enough of the black away to give enough clean maple to stain, I was through the veneer to the body wood in places.

So the random orbital sander came out and off came the rest of the veneer.

I was umming and ahhing about how to wire up the controls as it turned out I'd have to solder wires to the header pins on the piezo pre-amp board, and I couldn't work out which pin did what. The installation kit comes with lots of different wires and pots and switches connected to little push-on connectors, but apart for the one for the piezos themselves

Then the router came out as I needed to rout out two cavities; one for a battery compartment (on the rear) and one for the pre-amp board. I also needed to rout out some grooves so I could fit the piezo saddle wires through holes in the bridge plate and down to the bridge pickup rout. Here's the top after stripping and routing:



I finally decided that I couldn't work out which wires should go to where, so bought a new preamp kit for it, with all the necessary pots and wires. I also bought a stacked pot so that I could do the guitar volume and tone on it, and have the other knob as the acoustic guitar volume. This is supplies with the kit and is push/pull, with two two tone settings on it for the piezo. I'll also fit the supplied selector switch for electric, acoustic or both together. The supplied TRS output jack is also switched (for the battery) and the board detects whether there's a TS jack in, in which case both the acoustic and electric signals are summed together, or a TRS jack, in which case the electric and acoustic signals go to the T and R respectively, so they can be split to different amps.

I'll make up a small splitter box for Dave for this.

I've got a 4-way selector switch, to give him the pickups in series option as well as the standard Tele ones.

I was unsure as to what the body wood was. At first I thought it was alder, but after staining it yellow, the grain has come out a lot more and I'm sure it's some variety of mahogany or near-mahogany, but without the deep pores that real mahogany has:



I've now sprayed a couple of coats of vintage amber lacquer on the back, which has made it a bit darker (you can see the battery box rout here):



I think I'll just use clear lacquer on the top, to provide a bit of contrast and interest.