Tom's Travelcaster
- 23 hours ago
- 1 min read
There's a company called Traveler Guitars that makes very compact guitars to fit in the overhead bins of airplanes. Their original models were headless with the tuning pegs imbedded in the body. Weird looking and never very appealing to me. Then I saw they were making a full scale guitar with the usual headstock on top that looked like a Fender Stratocaster with part of the body cut away.
I set out to make my own improved version of a Travelcaster. I started with Fender's cheapest entry, the Debut strat
I cut away the top part of the body and the wood below the bridge including the output jack. Reading the reviews, there was a lot of criticism of Traveler putting the output jack on the back which makes the cable dig into your body. So on mine, I put the jack on the end next to the tone controls. The other innovation I made was to cut down the headstock from the traditional 6 on a side tuners to a 4 on one side, 2 on the other to make the overall length shorter. Of course, I painted the edges of the parts I cut away and also the new headstock. The Debut Strat came with a humbucker in the bridge position, so in order to have the option of traditional Strat single coil versus humbucker, I wired in a push-push switch to spilt the coils. Finally, I wanted to improve the looks by having more contrast, so I replaced the white pickup covers and knobs with black ones.
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