Well, I've bought a cheap(er) body from Gear4Music to try to make string-thru holes by hand... not easy. To hide the mess I made, I found this type of plate which I have installed on the back. Relax, the strings do pass through the body easily.
From there I used a maple neck I had bought from this chinese brand called YinFente; they sell on eBay, etc. There's worse, but they could work better; the headstock is a bit too long compared to a standard Tele headstock, which leads to a wider length between the machine head holes, 127mm from center to center to be exact. Impossible to install the usual Kluson style, you'll need something like the trapezoid type, or another machine head set where the tuners are installed independently one from another. I have left the 6mm adapters just in case, but you can remove them easily. The machine head holes have 9mm diameter by the way.
What else? Rounded neck pocket for a more comfortable high note playing, no electronics this time since there's an humbucker sized cavity on the neck position and you may want 500k pots, same Göldo bridge I usually use, vintage cup jack input, leveled frets, customized Merle Haggard pickguard with some rounded contours made by me, and the hardware such as knobs, string retainer and jack cup input will be sent inside the package.
The nitro checking is very cool, first time I have done it on a metallic color, and the neck has reacted very nicely to it too. There are some pretty cool details on the photos I took. Yeah, it's not the same construction as usual, but I really think you can make a good guitar out of it, not just something to look at, otherwise I wouldn't be selling it.
