Update 4 (shaping, sanding)

The nice people at my local music shop were glad to help. I traced out the body on a sheet of large paper I got from the art department at school, refined it a little, then cut it out.

I ended up taking the template on the picture above, laying it on anothe sheet of large paper, and making an opposite template that would let me see exactly what the guitar would look like cut.

Over the course of the next few days I took the guitar to the band saw.

Rough cut

The body as it is now

(The stuff to the bottom right of it is just water drying up)

The second picture is after quite a bit of sanding, too. I went out and bought a 30$ palm sander that is working just fine. both the front and back surfaces are real smooth now.

I chickened out and decided I'd wait until I buy the neck to cut the top end of it out. I'll shape either sides of the neck after I know what I'm dealing with.

I orded my pickguard on the 11th, so it should hopefully be here this week. The genius behind the pickguard is that it'll tell me exactly where I need to make my holes for the controls and pickups, making that part at least a little easier.

I have one concern right now that's really bugging me; I think I planed it down too far. It's sitting at a little less than 1 1/2" and I'm worrying that this won't leave me enough room to route. I hope there's a way to work around it.

Update 3 (Cutting, planing, gluing)

I forgot to bring my camera to the shop twice, so I think my intent for this to be an informative blog has just gone out the window.

Yesterday, me and a friend cut 2 3/4 inch strips of both ash and walnut, aswell as planed everything down straight and smooth so that we could stick them all together with the carpenter's glue. The actual gluing was a process in itself, and one that I'm not ambitious enough to try to explain without pictures, but in a nutshell: Lots of glue, lots of paper towels, lots of clamps, lots of spare 2x4 planks to place under and over.

I let the block dry overnight. The next day (today), I went in, took all the clamps off, scraped off the excess glue and paper (paper was there to prevent the glue from sticking to the 2x4 that were there to give the clamps something to hold onto. This would be alot easier to understand if I had a picture of it.). After this, I took it back to the planer and VERY GENTLY planed down to about 1 1/2 inches thickness to take off all the bits of glue and paper, and to have the entire slab be uniformly flat. Then I bought it home and took this shot:

It would have been really cool to have pictures of every step of the way, but my lack of short-term memory made it so that we skipped quite a few steps. Oh well.

Next step is to go to a guitar shop, grab a telecaster from the wall and trace the body onto a big piece of paper. I'm sure there are more precice ways of doing so, but I'm very lazy and this seems like the only viable solution.

Update 2 (lumber continued)

I planed out the wood today. Looks magical.

Update 1 (planning, lumber)

The Guitbox

To the left is the design I have in mind for my project guitar. It's basically a '72 fender telecaster deluxe with a P-94 in the neck and whatever else I can find for the bridge (the Wide Range is very expensive, but would be ideal). The idea is for this to keep me busy (slack semester), not to be finished ASAP; I don't see this thing being done until the end of summer at least.

The neck will be from Eden, I've seen them and I think they're awesome and you just can't beat their price (around 60-80$ on ebay).

As for the rest, we'll see.

The wood:

Today I went and got a piece of black walnut from this guy. 20$ for 5 feet long by 6 1/2 inches wide by 2 inches thick. Pretty sweet.

The middle will be Northern Ash, which I already bought from my buddy for 10$.

The following are the intial concept draft (up) and my plans to make the slab (down).

The slab will be 14 inches wide by 20 inches long by 1.5 inches thick. The body itself won't be that wide or tall, but I wanted to give myself alot of breathing room.

Tommorow (if I'm lucky) I'll take the wood to a planer and maybe even get the pieces all glued together. Very exciting times.

Guitbox launch

I decided to build a guitar after two of my friends showed me how easy (see: not unbelievably hard) it is to do. I have many years experience of playing guitar but not so many years experience in working with wood, but I figure that I can pull this off. After all, the only real thing I'll be building is body, which is the simplest thing in the construction of a guitar.

I'll update this every time I make progress.