What can I say ...........
So having a Quorum of surviving members of the Country Club, we had embarked on a summer Project to build a Guitar. Ronnie had mentioned that he had some pickups and I had a few Stratocaster bits sitting around from previous builds, so it seemed that we were well set for a starting point to build a Fifty Quid Partscaster Guitar - I should have known better.
We convened a meeting in the Shed to lay out our wares and figure out the approach. So there we sat, beer in hand, looking at this Stratocaster body and a couple of Necks and these lovely Telecaster pickups. So having one of those "we need a bigger boat" moments, a quick visit to ebay elicited a Telecaster body that really was shouting "rescue me" in a little voice. It was black and battered, not in an artisan fashionable relic'd way, this thing was just plain beaten up. A low bid won, as everybody else on Ebay seemed to have more sense or be looking in the other direction, so we were still on course to build our fifty quid guitar, and I did sort of come by a Telecaster neck the same way.
From there things quickly got out of hand (as they do) and this strange escalation process seemed to unexpectedly kick in out of nowhere. While keeping an eyeball on the auction for that battered tele body, I came across a Left Handed Black Bound telecaster guitar - solid Alder body and was the same make as the bound body I had used as the Donor for the Nashville Tele - it was brand new surplus stock going cheap, so as a black bound Tele was on the future agenda anyway, I grabbed it with both hands to add to the growing pile of parts (and growing momentum - just like a train wreck waiting to happen)
So to cut a very long story short, within a couple of weeks, we seem to have acquired a couple of Stat Bodies, same again in Telecasters and around half a dozen or necks of various Strat and Tele guises and all sorts of lovely miscellaneous bits of hardware along the way.
It's going to be a long but enjoyable summer re-arranging all of these pieces into a playable guitar like fashion to hit the combinations that work.