Congratulations goes out to Andrew Verge for his guitar build, to earn him Guitar of the Month for February, 2025.

Andrew used our TCK-1 kit as the basis to create his guitar.

“I always wanted a telecaster and decided why not build one? It should be easier than the hollow body with the Bigsby that I previously built, and it was.

I always liked that telecasters were associated with country music so the idea of a desert scene came to me. I put in ferrules by hand which was difficult.  I chose an ornate bridge with individual string rollers for better intonation, I also wanted the strings to go through the back. I painted the back with black acrylic paint and laid a base down of my image. The details were too fine to do by brush so I went in a direction of illustration and picked up some acrylic paint markers and continued my finish. I added a decorative stripe around the binding as an accent. My friend who has a workshop sprayed both the neck and body with auto Urethane and after it was done setting I wet sanded and got the desired finish. Assembly was straight forward.

The pickups included with the kit were swapped out for Fender deluxe drive telecaster pickups. Instead of using a standard pickguard I used a semi-hollow tele pickguard so you could actually see the fun illustrated finish due to their smaller size. I used locking tuners some string trees and I flipped the face plate to have my tone potentiometer closer to where I play for tone sweeps. The sustain gained from the roller bridge and the ferrules added, as well the locking tuners, gives this little beauty great tone. I put pink strings on it for fun.

I’m already working on my next solo kit which is a jazz bass 😉.”

– Andrew Verge

Editors note – The staff at Solo have named this the “Telecactus”