Teliax Thinline Project
My Teliax Thinline project is a Variax™ 300 equipped semi-hollow Telecaster Thinline body, fitted with the Variax technology minus their battery and powered 1/4" output jack in lieu of the passive pickup jack. Since I play through the PodXTLive I never used the powered jack just the digital cable connected to the pod so I went with this configuration. Although it can be adapted to accomodate both passive and vax with a miniswitch functioning as an AB.

Common questions I'm guessing you guys may have follow below with more pics...

How does the Thinline semi-hollow body affect the Variax tones?
I hoped the semihollow style would warm the tones up a bit and maybe decrese the piezo type sound, but IMO it did not much if at all. But I also don't have another 300 to do a side by side comparison. But to my surprise what did affect the Variax tones more than expected was the neck. I had a maple neck on there and actually the brightness difference compared to this ebony/mahogany combo seemed big. This was surprising especially since the Variax 600 comes with a maple neck, and they don't custom tweak the tones between the 300 (rosewood) and the 600.

How about playability and intonation?
Well the neck is pretty incredible compared to the 300. Its a Warmoth tele with a compound radius, very playable and intonates as good as you could ever hope for. In retrospect, I may have gone rosewood, not sure on this though. I originally went with the ebony to see how it would affect Variax tone and I think the more percussive nature of the ebony leads to a touch more of piezo noticability in tone. In general the neck with tuners is too heavy to balance the light thinline. Next time possibly a solid JagMaster type body.

Have you played the Variax and the passive pickup simultaneously?
Yes! And it is cool, talk about a tone combo. I've run the digital Variax cable through the pod and the passive cable through the Pod as well. It works and can create some interesting sound styles.

Whats going on inside?
I should have shot the inside before I closed her up (I will in the future), but I had to route out an area for the main Variax card to sit in. (I took all of the guts out of the 300 metal casings). I used a sheilding paint from StewMac. The switches are also out of their case but I used wire snips to trim away excess and keep the top portion of the metal case for mounting strength/stability. I also had to route out this area some to fit the switch board in. The bridge also required some routing, while in there I did copper foil insulate the wires from the bridge to the card and it did stop the feedback when switching past high gain models on the pod.

Aesthetics?
The body is an Warmoth Ash showcase buy that I used stew mac vintage stains on and about 7 coats of a polymerized tung oil--hand rubbed, and worked out OK. Tricky business to get the color tones right though to my taste. A wood pickguard may be good idea--cool looks and tone-wise possibly???

Feel free to email me if I could help with answer any further questions... info@dayspamarketing.com

Staining to get the Zebra contrasts

Whoops, routing with just a drill for that big output jack, can be tough business--I had to patch a piece that splintered off.

Control knob layout was tough, you are locked into the configuration of the 300 due to them being mounted on the computer card, I used a couple rosewood knobs on the tone controls to mix it up a little--chrome knobs (original 300s) are volumes.

I like the open texture of woods and so I didn't fill the Ash body or Mahogany neck, I think its much cooler tactile-wise.

Perfectly cut Warmoth graphite nut option.