Spalted Telecaster - Part 1

This is a build for Chris, who wanted a traditional Telecaster shape but something a little bit special in appearance. We looked through my wood pile and came up with this beautiful combination of woods:

The body will be walnut, the fretboard is a lightly patterned ebony, and the top will be an amazing book-matched spalted maple set.

Spalting is caused by the tree being attacked by a fungus, causing black lines in the wood itself:

In this case I'm hoping the spalting will tie in beautifully with the black ebony fretboard. The top has also got a really nice flame to it, as well as a dramatic contrast between the hardwood and sapwood. You can probably tell I'm pretty pleased Chris chose this piece of wood for me to work with. I'm looking forward to it!

We spent quite a long time working on how to orient the maple top to make the most of the spalting. We finally came up with something like this:

Apart from wood choice, there's a lot to decide on - hardware, pickups, colour of fretwire.....even for a simple Telecaster, there are lots of decisions to make. I really love this part of the process.

Oh, and completely failing to find the back of an envelope, the top of a workbench had to do for working out the price!

Thanks for reading.