Routing a tele ferrule block.

  I've been busy with all sorts of things lately, both in and out of the shop, so I haven't really had much time to blog.   I had a long weekend, so I was able to get some yardwork done, do a repair job for a co-worker of mine, and even start on a little of the actual construction of the Selmer copy.  As you can see, the shop is all sorts of messy and I wish I had more room, but I will some day when I'm actually able to do something about that.

  A co-worker of mine had heard that I went to school for guitar repair and asked me if I could route a ferrule block(click here if you're wondering what that is) for a tele copy he had.  Apparently whoever installed the previous ferrules didn't line them up or use proper drilling techniques to prevent chipping of the finish, so it was looking pretty ugly.

  I wasn't sure exactly how to remove the old ferrules, but did a little research and online forums suggested using a soldering iron to heat them up and then pull them out with a needle-nose plier.  This wasn't working for me and I wasn't too concerned with keeping the ferrules in tact, so I decided to try a screw extractor bit I had gotten from Sears a while back and it made extremely quick work of removing the ferrules.  I thought that was going to be the difficult part, but it turns out it was the easiest part of this job.

  Next, I mad a routing template for the ferrule block.  The manufacturer suggested using a half inch router bit, which I did, but I'm wishing I would have just used a quarter inch bit because the template was only a half inch wide itself, requiring me to do some fine tuning of the template to get the router bit to fit perfectly.  Then I taped the body up, marked a centerline as accurately as was possible, and positioned the template accordingly.  After I did the rout, it turned out I had positioned it slightly forward of the center of the existing string holes, so I did a little counter-sinking of the existing holes to help guide the stings from the ferrule block into the body holes that lead up to the bridge.

   I didn't take any pictures of of the routing because I was test fitting the ferrule block along the way and once it was in, it wasn't coming out easily again.  Here is the finished project and a much better looking backside of this tele copy:

 

    That's all I have for now, but I will be writing another post on the selmer progress soon.