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.
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