I took the day off work today, which gave me some time to work on the Temu-caster–with good results.
I removed the strings and took the neck completely off the body. Then I used a notched straightedge to check the neck. Surprise: it has a two-way truss rod. With no string tension, I had to tighten it just slightly from neutral to get the neck perfectly straight.
After reattaching the neck, I tightened–or at least checked–every screw. Another surprise: the rear strap-button screw is stripped. More accurately, the wood inside the hole is stripped. I can turn the screw forever and it never gets tighter; the button spins pretty freely. I think I’ll leave it alone until it becomes a real problem. Then I’ll probably glue it.
I put new strings on it: Ernie Ball Super Slinky Custom Gauge nickel-wound .009s. I threaded them through the tuning posts, though I noticed the factory strings appeared to go downward into the posts rather than out the other side. Maybe I’ll try that next time.
I checked the neck relief, which is getting harder for me to assess because of my eyesight. Still, I measured it at roughly 0.2 mm, about .008 inch, so I left it alone.
String height was around 4/64 inch across the board, so I didn’t adjust that either. Maybe the lesson is that if you straighten a Telecaster neck and put .009s on it, everything just works out.
The intonation was the one thing that needed attention. Every string was sharp and needed to be lengthened, which was easy enough. This guitar has a very traditional Tele bridge, though, so each string can’t be intonated individually: the low E shares a saddle with the A, the D with the G, and the B with the high E.
Still, it’s plenty good enough for rock ’n’ roll. Best of all, I no longer have to tune the G string flat just to get a decent-sounding D chord.