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I'm an artist DGGD and I like to build stuff out of wood. I have a scroll saw and a few simple power tools. A jig saw, a Mouse detail sander & a drill. I have built funky looking clocks and shelves, what I call functional art.
and made a cigar box guitar. Its a an electric, resonator 4 string guitar. The Cigtar (as i call it) has a small aluminium dish inside the box and a single coil pickup with volume & tone control. It turned out pretty good and sounds great though my Marshall amp (Fig. 2).
So what's next I thought ...hmmm..I'm gonna' build a Telecaster! Building a 3/4 size Telecaster...... Before I start I would like to make something clear. In no way do I think I'm a Luthier. My tools are humble. I have had no training in wood working (except for two semesters in highschool many, many years ago, I think I built a spice rack for my mom). All my guitar building ideas came from what I found on the internet. The guitar I'm about to describe building is just a functional piece of art, in no way do I consider this to be a professional quality instrument. It's just fun to build and a good mind exercise solving the building problems that arise as I go along. If i can play a 3 chord blues song on it when I'm done, then mission accomplished.
At Home Depot I bought a long piece of kiln dried maple 2.5" wide for the neck and a 5.5" wide piece of maple for the body which is cut in half. The body piece's are glued to the side's of the neck piece. I drilled holes in the neck & body sides and inserted dowels, then glued & clamped them together (Fig.3). 
Using a Telecaster bluep0rint I found on the internet, I traced up the plan in Adobe Illustrator, scaled it to 3/4 scale and printed it out. I glued the drawing to a piece of Bristol board cardboard. Then the shape is cut out with a x-acto knife and taped to the wood (Fig. 4).
After tracing the Tele outline on to the wood, I clamped the wood to my Workmate table and cut out the shape of the guitar with a Jigsaw. This was really difficult because Maple is a hardwood and my little Black & Decker jigsaw was really working hard to cut the curves of the guitar shape. I left a little piece at the end of the guitar body for clamping, it's a straight cut and I'll take it off later as the guitar nears completion. Looks like a guitar now... LOL... a Mini-Caster (Fig.5).
At Steve's Music Store in Toronto I bought a Tele bridge plate and saddles. Looking at it I thought I could of gone to Home Depot and bought a metal plate, a few springs, screws and pre-tapped metal cylinders and made a bridge myself, but for 40 bucks the Tele bridge is pre-drilled for the strings, which will really help with the placement of drilling the holes for the string through body. Next up I'm going to cut-in the places were the Pick-up, Volume Pot and Jack go.
Figure 7 shows the routing job for the guitars electronics. I don't have a router so i used a combination of drilling and jigsawing. It looks rough 
The back plate (Fig. 8) is cut and mounted to the back of the guitar body. this is nessessary to hold in all the guitars guts (electronics).
Next all the body, neck and head carving/sanding is done. I used drum sanding drill bits with my electric drill to smooth out the body and remove all the wood burns the jig saw left behind. The neck is carved out with a new grinder I got. A combination of grinding and sanding produced a fantastic job with rounding out the back of the neck (Fig. 9). I'm VERY pleased with the result. 
Figure 10 shows the hardware fitted to the guitar so far so good!
The guitar is almost ready to be coated with a finish and the fret board has to be built.
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, but not to worry, it gets all covered up with the bridge plate, control plate and back plate.