Guitar Project Part 4: Finishing

No, it didn't take me six months to finish the guitar--it just felt like it (and I've only now gotten around to posting the pictures). Not bad looking, eh? And you should hear how it sounds! All in all, this was a fantastic experience, and the finished guitar came out better than I dared imagine.

This is my final post about the build process. You can read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here, here, and here.

After installing the hardware for the first time, I stripped everything and sanded down to about 400 grit. After masking around the mahogany and raising the grain with water, I rubbed a few coats of red stain into the wood. Next came the maple, with a lighter amber color.

Having come so far with the build, I was terrified of messing something up at this point. Mixing and applying the stain was a trial and error process, with plenty of error and panicked cover-ups. Lowlights included spilling a jug of stain all over the back of the guitar. My dad was incredibly valuable for his advice and moral support during the finishing process.

Next came grain filler, which is a requirement for a gloss finish with open-grained woods like mahogany. The first attempt of applying this was a complete disaster. The water-based grain filler made the water-based dye run and collect into a bloody tie-dye effect that hadn't appeared in my test pieces. Fortunately, no pictures exist of my precious guitar in this state. The only solution was to sand the body down to beneath the stain, re-stain, apply some shellac (to seal the stain), grain-fill again, and touch up the dye with a Q-tip. Needless to say, I was not happy about having to do this.

But it was paying off. The color was great!

All that was left was the clear coat. To make things easy (well, easier...) we used cans of aerosol laquer. To ensure that everything got coated evenly, we set up a makeshift poorly-ventilated paint room in the garage. We hung the guitar through its pegholes with a bent coat-hanger contraption:

Of course, leaving the guitar unattended to dry for hours, suspended by a coat-hanger (in the winter!) made me nervous. But everything came out OK. Four or so coats later, I was ready to sand.

My recollection of the sanding process is quite blurry, since it occurred in a single painful six-hour chunk. I wet-sanded the whole guitar down to 1500 grit and then used a polishing compound. Soon after, I cleaned up the frets, installed the hardware, and strung it up! Here are the pretty pictures:

I've been happily rocking out on the new axe for the better part of 6 months now. There have been no problems so far. There are a couple of minor dings and scratches, but those give it character :)

Onto the next endeavor! A semi-hollow body? An electric bass? Stay tuned...

Guitar Project Part 3: The Body

It's time for a long-overdue update on the guitar progress. Here are my earlier posts for those of you following along at home:

Part 1: The Design
Part 2: The Neck

First up for the body: finding wood. Although my goal was to make a unique, new-to-the-world guitar, I smartly decided to stay conservative when it came to body geometry, wood choice, et cetera. Even experienced luthiers cannot fully predict what a guitar will sound like before it is strung up, so if i was to output a reasonably playable instrument, it would probably be best not to be too adventurous with my materials choices.

Since I've always wanted but could never afford a Les Paul, I chose a nice African mahogany body with a bird's-eye maple top. I found some mahogany on eBay and bought a nice chunk of bird's-eye from the local woodworking supply shop. Since I wanted a book-matched top, I ended up spending hours using a combination of table saws, hand saws, and planers to make this one piece of wood into two. The local woodworkers' guild was very generous with their planer, but it still took a LOT of elbow grease for me to make the bookmatching cut. Before doing anything else, I made a cardboard outline and mocked up the body with some hardware and a fingerboard. As always--I figured an early and rough mock-up would help me decide what to change. In this case, it looked pretty good, so I plowed ahead:


After gluing up the wood and cutting out a rough profile on the bandsaw, I was pleased with the result:

The next step was shaping the arch on top. Using my trusty microplane, I first turned the flat surface into three sloping planes to set the neck angle and bridge position correctly. Making paper templates for everything was very important. Next, I sloped all of the sides down to the correct position around the edges. This all went surprisingly smoothly, but my arm was starting to look like Popeye's by the end. Unfortunately, the arch does not look very exciting in pictures yet, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

After (carefully!) chiseling out the neck pocket, I could finally put everything together for the first time. This was one of several rewarding moments throughout the process that reassured me that this work was going toward an end:


The next steps were to bandsaw out the cutaway and drill holes for the pickups. In retrospect, I would have had a cleaner result using a router for the pickup holes, but my drill press + chisel method was just fine too. They're hidden anyways, so nobody will know... unless they read this. You can see some of the nice figuring on the wood in this picture as well:


I did learn my lesson with the control cavity--using a router and two templates for the main cavity and the shelf for its plate:


The binding was also a challenge. I used a Dremel tool with a special guide fixture from Stewart McDonald. Special credit goes to my dad, who convinced me against my will that a binding would be cool enough to justify the trouble.



Speaking of my dad, here he is holding the guitar after gluing the neck to the body:


At this point, I could not wait to string it up and start jamming. The remaining steps--wiring up the electronics and installing the bridge and tailpiece--flew by in a couple of days:


And voila! I strummed the first notes and it sounded and played way better than I had expected. All that's left is finishing, dressing the frets, and performing a few other tweaks. I am still undecided on the finish, so if anybody has ideas (preferably along with a sample picture), please post it in the comments.

Tape Dispenser Design Redux

I was feeling a little bad about my tape dispenser design being rather, well, bourgeois--so I decided to take another stab at it. This was also an excuse for me to play around with some of SolidWorks' sheet metal tools. Behold: a tape dispenser for the people!


This is a one-piece sheet metal design. The tape roll can be removed by squeezing together the protruding tabs. It comes in anodized aluminum and galvanized steel--mostly because these materials looked cool for the renderings. The drawing below includes the flat-pattern shape, in case you are wondering what the original cut-out would look like.

If anybody knows of an ongoing tape dispenser design contest, I would love to hear about it!

Tape Dispenser Design

I'm not an industrial designer, but sometimes I like to pretend :)

Having gotten my SolidWorks CSWP-Surfacing certification this week, I was itching for a little project. Here are the results:


It's not very clear from the renderings, but the orange thing is made of rubber and pulls apart inside the tape ring for when you want to change rolls. The base is a cast metal with chrome plating and there is a rubber non-stick base.

Obviously this would be a rather expensive and non-green product. But I had lots of fun modeling it and would love some feedback on the design.

Get Some Perspective!

It's surprisingly easy to forget that this exists.

Moving to WordPress

A heads-up:

I will be moving this blog to WordPress soon because their platform is much more flexible. The new site will still be accessible from http://benjaneering.com, and will preserve all of the old posts and comments. In addition to the blog, I will also be adding new pages about my design work--with the intention of turning Benjaneering into more of a webfolio.

Stay tuned for the switch.

Guitar Project Part 2: The Neck

With the specifications in place, it was time to start getting my hands dirty. I will try to keep this post brief, but I would be happy to share more of what I learned if anybody has specific questions.

My friend Will generously permitted me to salvage components from a very cool looking but irreparably damaged guitar of his. Besides a usable truss rod and some cool-looking knobs, it was great to have this around for reference and reverse-engineering purposes.


I decided to start with the neck, since it is the most dimensionally critical and easy to mess-up part of the guitar. I had chosen to make the neck out of maple because it is stronger than mahogany, allowing a thinner design without worrying about the truss rod breaking through the back.

To make the neck blank, I cut up a long plank of nice-looking maple (from a local lumber yard) and laminated it three wide. Laminating provides extra strength, since the grain runs in slightly different directions in each section. After laminating, I routed a channel for the truss rod.

Here you can see the neck blank with the truss rod loosely in place:


To add some additional thickness where the headstock would be, I glued two more pieces of maple to the sides, making it five wide. The next step was to cut out the profiles--vertical and horizontal--on a band saw. The band saw I was using needed quite a bit of setup and a new blade. I spent a good amount of time getting to know the saw before making the cut, because this step was critical and cutting through 3'' of hard maple is not a trivial matter.

Fortunately, everything came out great. Before attaching the fingerboard, I would need to drill the access hole for the truss rod and cement the rod with epoxy. "Hey!" I thought, "this is starting to look like a guitar!"


I had originally planned on making the guitar entirely from scratch, but I quickly realized that buying a pre-slotted fingerboard was the way to go. Accurately shaping and slotting my own would have required a significant investment in tools and time. Also, if I screwed up the fret spacing even a little, it would render the guitar unplayable. So I was happy to buy a pre-slotted rosewood fingerboard (pictured above, next to the neck) from Stewart-MacDonald.

Now for the fun part: shaping the neck. There really isn't much of a science to this; I shaved it down to a slightly asymmetrical profile that felt good in my hand. I started at the ends and then worked down the middle, checking the progress periodically with a straightedge.

For this task, my Microplane was my best friend. These are also great for grating cheese, but I wouldn't recommend using the same blade.


Next up: fretting. Although I can't really know how good my fretting job was until the guitar is finished, this step seemed easier than I had anticipated. I cut the frets and bent them by hand with pliers, and then gently hammered them into the fingerboard. Filing down the ends took a little while, but the process was ultimately nothing to fret about (lame pun intended).


If I were planning on making fret marker inlays, it would have been easier to do this before installing the frets. I may change my mind at some point and put inlays in, but I think the fingerboard looks rather nice naked. I'm not big on needless ornamentation. Side dots, however, would be necessary for playability. These were a breeze to make: simply drill holes in the fingerboard, glue in a plastic rod, and cut it flush.


At this point, the neck was pretty much finished. I was very pleased with my success, and with the amount that I was learning about guitars and woodworking. So much for keeping this post brief! Stay tuned for progress on the body.