Update 6

I just finished placing an order at the greatest guitar builder's website ever. I bought everything that was left to buy, and it cost me 142.50$ shipped. I'm done spending money on this project. Sweet!


-TOTAL COST BREAKDOWN-
(All costs rounded off)

Slab of Northern Ash........................10.00$
Slab of Black Walnut........................20.00$
Palm sander.....................................30.00$
EDEN neck......................................60.00$
Pickup, bridge................................104.00$
Pickup, neck....................................90.00$
Gotoh hardtail bridge......................46.00$
Wiring kit (Les paul)........................36.00$
String ferulles (set of 6)......................7.50$
Volume and tone knobs....................14.50$
String retainers.................................3.00$
Neck mounting plate.........................8.00$
Pickguard screws (14 of them)............6.00$
Shipping (Stewmac order)................21.50$
-------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL..................................426.50$

Pretty goddamn cheap if you ask me. I guess all there is left to do now is see if it was all worth it!

Update 5

Been a while! Going to college and getting a job got in the way of this project.

I got quite two main things done since the last update.

• Found out that the only pickup that I can use with the pickguard without modifying it is the Fender "Wide Range". Can't use any other because of the mounting brackets/screws. Originals (from the seventies) are around $500-800. The Reissue pups are around $120, but I was able to get one from my local music store for $104.00 (someone had ordered one and never picked it up) which I'll use in bridge position. The neck pup is on it's way from ebay, which cost me $90.00 shipped. These bastards aren't cheap!

• I bought an EDEN neck from ebay, $60.00 shipped. It arrived today. As you can see from the picture, It doesn't have the fender emblem or style, but I don't give a shit since it was way cheaper and after all this IS a custom guitar. The quality of this neck is pretty awesome. I had some spare tuning keys from a broken twelve string so I used those.
  

There's still a ton of things left to do, but for now I'm focusing on routing out the neck pocket. That's the tough part. Once that's done, I've got to order more parts, wire the electronics, lacquer the body and put it all together.

Stay tuned, friends.

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.