Guitar Building

A combination rain and a stomach bug has meant I’ve had time on my hands to ponder what the end guitar will look like. If I’m brave enough to try a stain, here is what it might look like (via some bad Photoshop):

Natural

Blue wood stain

A redish wood stain

A blue – black burst stain

A rubbish photo but I forgot to take one during the day. I spent a few hours sanding the neck and blending all the contours. I’m quite happy with the result. The neck is still pretty deep but not a club. The main time was hand sanding all of the concave parts, working from P80, P120, P180 to P220. It took lots of time and isn’t perfect, but looks a lot better for it.

Only bit left before fretting is sanding down the fretboard. A bit of the fretboard splintered off while I was cutting the nut. I’ve glued it back, but I’m going to have to be careful when sanding.

My plan is to fret it, glue in the nut and then look at finishing options. I’m thinking of an oiled back of neck but a sprayed lacquer over a water slide decal for the headstock. Soon be onto starting the body while I wait between coats of the neck to dry.

I didn’t make much progress on the neck this weekend. I smoothed out the back of the carve a bit and cut the nut slot. What remains is a lot of sanding and smoothing of transition areas.

While it rained, I had a think about adding a logo of some form to breakup the headstock. Some ideas……

Lots of progress over the bank holiday weekend

• Remeber to measure and not just guess how deep to drill the tuner holes! Got it wrong, but wasn’t too bad to redrill after the headstock was cut to thickness.
• The fretboard has been glued on. This time I used two pins (hammered into the neck and the head cut off) to help located the fretboard in the correct place. Last time I found the glue made it very hard to clamp the fretboard without it shifting.
• The fretboard was cut to size using a template bit on the router, then side dots holes were drilled and inserted. I went for white dots this time, as the black dots on the previous guitar are too hard to see.
• I decided to fit the fretboard before cutting the headstock to thickness, which worked a lot better. Having a bandsaw helps a lot!
• Fretboard was radiused using a 10″ sanding block and sticky backed sand paper. Final sandering will be done once the neck carve is done

At this point it starts looking like a neck. Using a carving file which I just bought, I’ve done the rough shaping of the neck join. Still very rough, but as I found with spokeshave, it takes time to get used to any tool. I’ve done a first pass on the neck carve as a whole, though it’s not very even at the moment.

Here is the neck after I:

• Band sawed it rougly to shape
• Attached the 12mm template and routed it to shape
• Fitted the truss rod

Next I cut the tuner holes from the back to 3/4 depth (with the aim of giving clean holes when the neck is reduced in depth). A lesson learnt at this stage, don’t use a lot of double sided sticky tape if you are also going to clamp the joint. If you do, it’ll will be a real pain to get the template off (and in this case the template was destroyed trying to get them apart). Annoying but not the end of the world.

This time I’m going to fit the fretboard before cutting the headstock to depth.

I’m still not confident enough to try a ‘traditional’ fender style truss rod (front or back fitted). However the type I used for the last build requires taking the neck off to adjust it, which is fairly annoying. My Peavey 7-String has a spoke nut truss rod which worked really well, as does my Music man. This type has a wheel which sticks out the bottom of the neck which you can get to between the strings. The only place I could find them to buy was from America but they aren’t too bad to import.

I used the side rail on my router for the first time, along with a bit that can plunge route, which gave a really nice channel.

I had to couter drill a large channel for the spoke nut, which was a bit of a challenge as my cheap 10mm drill bit didn’t like the hard maple. I’ll have to source a nicer one for next time (my nice drill bit set only goes upto 8mm).

I decided to pause on the body at this point and start on the neck. The neck template was made in the same way as the last neck. The 4+2 headstock was chosen to keep the guitar dimensions more compact.

• The centre line is marked
• Nut line is marked, at the desired width (41.8mm in this case to match my Axis Super Sport)
• The end point is marked, at the desired width
• These lines are joined with a stright edge
• A print out of the headstock shape is cutout and traced onto 6mm MDF
• Route the neck using straigh edges as guides. The headstock is cut close to line on a bandsaw and sanded to line

The headstock is a very tight fit for the tuners (as it’s been downscaled to keep proportions with the body). I’ve had to space to tuners slightly wider to allow the tuners to fit. For this project I’m using Schaller Nylons to keep the weight down, as the last guitar was headstock heavy.

The body shape cut out.

I could of played with the pickup locations in Photoshop but it was easier to do it physically. My current thoughts is a single coil in the neck and a P90 for the bridge pickup. I’ve wanted to try Fralin Blues Specials for a while, so that’ll be the neck pickup. Not sure what to go for the bridge pickup as I know very little about P90’s.

I wanted a really narrow neck at the body, which means a narrow string spacing at the bridge. The only one I could find was a Schaller Tune-o-matic style, which means I’ll have to recess it to avoid a neck angle. I’ll go for through body stringing as I’ve never been a fan of stop pieces visually.

Not sure around the neck pocket (as I don’t know how wide the neck will be at that point yet), but I’m quite happy with the general outline.

As you can see I’ve added the cental line (all important), the bridge position and the neck pickup position (where the 24th fret would be). This template will be cut out and copied onto 12mm MDF.

I started in Photoshop by tracing over a PRS image, though it’s a farily standard double cut shape. I printed it out 1:1 scale onto three pieces of A4 and now for a Blue Peter moment…..