Had a lovely Tele’ on the bench this week, a 52 Re-Issue.  Nothing really wrong with it, just needed a setup to get it playing right…

The trouble with these guitars is the truss-rod adjustment, it’s on the bottom of the neck.  You could make the adjustment by loosening the strings and the neck, give it a tweek, put it back and try again, but you could end up taking the neck off 4 or 5 times until you get it right.

The other option is to bolt it on to a Neck Jig.  That way you can add strings at normal tension……

to measure the neck set…

and adjust the truss-rod…..

While it was apart I also cleaned the ‘pots.

With the neck back on the guitar, now I can complete the standard setup.  Action at the 12th fret…

The outside strings first…

followed by the inside four, matching the fretboard radius…

The action at the 1st fret was fine…

although the intonation needed quite an adjustment.

The bridge pickup was a little weak so I raised it just a little.

There we go, all done.  This one also meets my personal criteria, do I want to keep it? would I like to own one of these?  A definite yes please.