Teles are better.

Basses with a Tele body shape didn't exist when I did the small one. It's a conversion of guitar parts in a 25.5" scale. The larger one I did later using a 34" scale Precision neck. Since then, Fender's started building 32" Tele basses in that body shape. The larger one I put together ended up being a neck diver, and I rebodied it later in the same body style as the bigger early 70's Tele basses.

Ah, I thought you'd remember this one....This was a 50 Tele that came to me badly butchered.  It had two humberes crudely routed into the body, a Gibson tune-o-matic bridge, and poorly aftermarket string-through holes with ferrules on the front and back, an elogated control cavity that had 4 - 500K pots (two tone, two volume) Armaco black knurled knobs with pennies glued in the centers, and a Les Paul three way switch. There was a fairly odd looking tortoiseshell pickguard and the control panels was like a longer Telly plate made of black/white/black pickguard material. The neck (hold on to your lunch!) had been scalloped by some mad scientist, and then when my buddy first acquired it, he tried to fill the scallops with marine epoxy, and refret it with Jumbo frets. It had been fitted with a set of those diagonal Fender tuners from the 70's that everybody hates.  The body (which had several taypers of paint, mostly brushed on coats, and when it came to me the body and the face of the headstock had been painted in a bright, bright electric teal colour.

There were a lot of issues in restoring it...I had to get rid of the string-through holes (most '59's were top-loading bridges), fill the pickup and control routs, rerout them for Tele single coils and a regular 2 knob +pickup switch-style control plate control plate, and then grain-fill the body before it went for paint.  To finish the story on the body, I test assembled it with a new black bakelite guard, a set of a Vintage-style Noiseless Tele pickups, a Fender bridge which had factory modified for top-loading strings, a set of three Wilkinson adjustable-pivot compensated saddles, Torres Engineering two-stage treble and midrange  control, and a four way Tele pickup switch.  When it was ready for paint, I stripped it back to bare wood, and the body went to the interior of BC to the guy who ran the body shop technology lab at an Okanagan university, to be painted by the guy who used to mastermind BASF's paint production division. It was to be painted pearlescent  butterscoth blond  with a special clear coat. It came back, months later, looking gorgeous, but it turned out he had surface sanded so much off the front and back that the parts wouldn't fir - all the routs had to be deepened. I built a special Tele-shaped cradle that was lined in red velvet to hold the body at exactly the right depth to compensate for the oversanded top, and rerouted it. Everything went fine....until I left a tiny ridge of material at the outside edge of the neck pocket, to be caewefully sliced off with an x-acto blade at the end. The clear coat was so brittle that it broke a big chip out of the body.  It ended up going back to the same place to be stripped and repainted. The whole thing added a good two years to the build.  The neck was another story..... My biddy didn't want to spend the 1000.00 he was being quoted to replace the fretboard. Ultimately, I took the brutalized scalloped 59 neck as part payment for the restoration, and I supplied him a TL-62  Fender Japan neck to replace it, fitted with a set of Wilkinson vintage tuners. I worked on that thing on and off for about five years. I set it up as well as I could, and then decided to have a pro do a setup which definitely made it even better. It plays nicely, and with the stealth mods - the four way switch that adds the series pickup position, the two-stage Torres Advanced Midrange tone control, the Noiselss pickups and the adjustable pivoting saddles - it plays better than any original 59 I've played (and I've owned and played three others).