Andy Builds a Guitar

(or, Andy tortures a piece of wood to make it sing.)

This project has been a long time in the making, and I'm quite glad to finally be able to post a few pictures of it. For now, it'll just be pictures, and I'll add some more text as I go along so you understand the process.

There's undoubtedly such a thing as too much planning ahead; I didn't get anywhere near that when I started building my first guitar.  Aside from skimming through a few books, I did a lot of it by the seat of my pants. I'll show you a few of the mistakes I made and problems that I ran into, in case you're one of those people that's run across this page and wants to build one for yourself.

And if you want me to build you the guitar of your dreams... write to me and we'll talk, I guess.

Have fun!

Andy

First off, I think it's fair to say that you don't want to tackle this if you're brand-new to woodworking. Sorry. I might go further to say that a few tools are necessary, too. Here's what I think is the bare minimum:

Perhaps my most glaring omission in this little how-to (or rather, how-I-did-it; the two aren't necessarily the same!) is coverage of building the neck. From what I've seen on the subject, the neck is a formidable project in and of itself. So instead of trying to build what I knew I didn't have the tools or patience for, I simply used the neck that came with the old 12-string that I was getting a few other parts from, as well.  I did completely disassemble the neck, and I'm repairing and refinishing that as a separate project. My advice for the beginner is to buy a new, pre-made neck for your first guitar, and enjoy the prospect of actually completing a workable guitar, rather than going mad trying to scrape together all the tools necessary for fitting and dressing frets.

You'll want to start out by drawing the design for your body onto a heavy paper template that you can cut out and use to trace onto the wood you've chosen for the body.  Trace lightly, as things may change. Next, using the neck as a template, trace the location of your neck slot and rout it out.  It might seem odd to start here, but there are good reasons for it. For starters, the neck slot pretty much determines the alignment of the rest of the guitar. If you build a perfect body, and accidentally get the neck slot turned one way or the other, your strings won't line up with your pickups, your neck will warp, and in general, you won't be too happy. You can see in the picture here that I've fit the neck into the neck slot, and, setting a ruler against the sides of the neck, drawn lines down the body. Use these lines to re-center the outline for the body. Don't erase them; they'll be handy later for centering the placement of the pickup and tremolo cavities.

Right about now you're probably dying to go cut out the shape of the body.  Go for it. Use a bandsaw if you can get access to one, starting at any point you wish. Keep the blade guide as close as possible to the surface of the wood to avoid having the blade wander.  Also keep in mind that there's a limit to how tight a turn you can make; when I went to do the cutouts on this guitar, I discovered that the blade simply wouldn't make that tight a turn. I ended up doing the cutouts with a scroll saw, instead.

You can see here another reason to rout your neck slot before cutting the body shape of the guitar; If I had waited to do the neck slot at the same time I did the pickup and tremolo cavities, I would have had no surrounding wood to support the router. A good book saved the day on this one--I wouldn't have thought to do the different cavities at different stages of the process.

The beveled edge was done with a 45º router bit. (You can see it a little better here.) Simple, but I like the way it looks, and it takes off the square edge that would leave an uncomfortable indent in my arm after a few hours of playing.

The two strips running down the middle were made by routing two, 1/4" wide by 5/8" deep slots  down the middle of the guitar.  I ran the router against a steel straightedge that I clamped to the body and the workbench, and went very slowly. You always hold your breath a little when you're doing anything on the top of the guitar, because it's really difficult to correct any mistakes you might make. The inlay strips are bloodwood, a wood I have become very fond of recently.  In any case, plan ahead; I inlaid these strips after I had beveled the edge and routed the cavities, and it took a good deal of work with a variety of tools to match that bevel on the bottom edge. It still doesn't look quite right.

Once you've worked out where you want all your controls to be, go ahead and drill the holes for them, all the way through the body. There's a few reasons for this: 1) You won't have to worry about drilling through the much thinner wood after the cavity has been routed; 2) Whatever splinters you make when the drill comes out the bottom won't matter, because it will be removed anyway; 3) you'll have zero guesswork about where your electronics will be when you turn the guitar over to make the control cavity.

The bottom of this electronics cavity was supposed to be flat and smooth, but sometimes entropy has other plans. When you're routing out the cavities, stop every now and then and make sure the bit hasn't loosened from the chuck and started working it's way out. I caught this one just before it ruined the whole guitar, but just barely. The wood around the holes is scarcely a sixteenth of an inch thick; another minute or so, and it probably would have broken through.

This is, by the way, is another good reason to drill the holes for your controls before you rout the electronics cavity: so you can gauge the depth of your cut!

You'll want to drill the holes for the wiring at this point. Here I'm using a 12" long 5/8" drill to bore in from the neck slot all the way through the pickup cavity to the tremolo cavity. Surprisingly, it's pretty easy to do; when the guitar is clamped down, simply lay the bit flat in the neck slot, and keep it pointed in the right direction. With long holes like this, remember to pull back the bit regularly to clear out the shavings that would otherwise get trapped. Use a similar technique to drill tunnels between the control cavity and the tremolo cavity; on this guitar, I simply inserted the drill in the hole I had made for the jack, and drilled directly across. If you can't do this, angle the drill into one of the cavities and pray that it ends up in the other one. I suggest going in from the top of the guitar in case the tunnel doesn't come out quite where you planned.

Spray booth? What spray booth?

Applying the finish to the guitar is probably the longest stage, and arguably the most boring. Like the rest of what I've described, planning ahead is probably the one thing you can do that will most improve your chances of success.

Case in point: one of the books I was reading indicated that, since I was using mahogany, I would have to seal the wood before applying the lacquer. After a quick look, I found some polyurethane finish that indicated it would seal the wood nicely, so I went ahead and applied it.  That set me up for a rather rude surprise when I went to buy the lacquer--it said right on the can, "Do not apply over polyurethane finishes." Oops! A quick check with those helpful hardware folks revealed that if I had used the lacquer, I would have softened the poly and ruined the finish completely.   I ended up having to get clear enamel to finish the body.  It wasn't my first choice, but it seems to be working well in spite of me.

I'm still in the finishing stages right now. I'll report back soon to let you know of any other trials, tribulations, tips or tricks that I may encounter.

Test fitting the parts. Yeah, the humbucker is green.