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Thank you for your constructive post.
As an example my Holdsworth HH1X has chambers, is a tele and sounds way way more than a 335 than any Tele Thinline I played, and I played a lot of them for decades until they annoyed me enough to get rid of them. Pity though that I sold my 69.

So it can be done, to get closer to a 335, and Carvin/Kiesel made a good stab at it, never mind the institutionalized nay-saying.
Brian may Red special with neck and middle (humbucker mode) as I can remember, is about as close to 335 as I could get, but due to the wrong pickups it honks too much on the high-E in upper registers. The cavities sure makes a big difference there. If it has standard humbuckers it would be very much like a 335. It definitely has that push behind the note a good 335 has.

I will keep your experiences in mind.

I will look at your experiences listed and compare with the BHM/HH1X and make a decision how I will apply it to the tele body.
It will definitely not be an arch top. Teles look real awkward with archtops.

I have this junker guitar that I experimented on, it started from a cheap harmony archtop. I added a pickup and ran a brace from the neckblock to the endblock so that I could easily remove the back and the thing would stay in tune. I experimented glueing all kinds and shapes of wood into it and carving the interior wood into different shapes. At one time I wanted to make it as light as possible while still sounding like an electric guitar.
Later I add a bunch of hardwood trying to get it to sound like a 335. Now there are pounds of ebony in there.

My conclusions: changing the wood a little bit under the bridge and the pickup pretty much always changed the sound noticeably. Unfortunately they were just different sounds that I didn't like too much. Taking the back off never seemed to make any difference. I'll bet the folks at Gibson made a lot of prototypes to invent the 335.

I don't have much advice for you. You might consider roughly and cheaply knocking out a few experimental bodies, screwing the same tele neck, bridge and control plate on until you find one you like. I have a couple guitars I play now where I can remove the pickups and control plate without unsoldering anything except the ground wire to the bridge. It makes experimenting easier.

Good luck, it sounds like fun!

It has different scale length.

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