This was a Tele I made around 1990, it started with just making a body out of scrap wood but ended up being rather expensive after buying all the parts. It was made just for fun and to try a handful of ideas & techniques.

The string bender is the most obvious weirdness but the pickups are a bit strange also. Besides using active EMG's there is no pickup selector switch, that freaks out some guitarists. The 4 knobs are a volume, pickup blend, mid boost, and passive tone. Blending pickups is quite foreign to most guitarists and they are often surprised how many subtle tones they are missing just turning pickups on and off.

The body was made with scraps of flamed & birdseye maple for the top 1/4 inch layer with purpleheart veneer in between the pieces. The back is hard maple under the flamed areas and swamp ash under the birdseye. The wood choices were made to use a dense hard wood to bolt the neck to and use a lightweight wood for the rest of the body trying to shave a few ounces.

I originally tried to paint the body & neck in a silver/gray stain finish but once I got it on the guitar it looked much worse than on the scraps I tested. So the neck and back of body were finished in solid black to hide the error. 

In the above picture you can see a graphite nut with a layer of purpleheart and a graphite string tree.

I never really finished this one, I left the back plate unfinished and never made a plate for the string bender. Sometimes laziness just can't be overcome.

A closeup of the workings of the Parsons White string bender. It works very well.

You can see the slot for the strap button and the tuning hole for the string bender to the left of that. And the pearl side dots and abalone face dots.

Since the neck is bolting to hard maple it doesn't need a neck plate and the heel can be nicely rounded.

The pickguard was made by laminating veneers together and then cutting to shape. The top veneer is purpleheart but it was never very purple and now looks more like walnut 2 decades later. This guitar was finished in Hydrocote, one of the first water based lacquers from the 1980's.

8 pounds 2 ounces or 3685 grams