Newbie In Need Of Help

[ibanez_crazy]

Redone and refinished, modified and restored a couple of guitars already.Im on my way to building my 1st guitar from scratch. I have a basic template for the body shape and i dont know if it would be easier to draw the trem cavity and pickup onto the blank and use the straight edge of the blank to help guide the router, or to cut out the body shape out and use templates to cut out the cavities. Anyone done both and had an easier time one way? Thanks

[Gorecki]

Templates, templates, templates! Best method on covering your backside!

Otherwise, do some searches, there are lots of tidbits hidden in the archives!

[mledbetter]

aside fromt he advice to search and , i would strongly second the last advice.. MAKE TEMPLATES.. if you make the perfect pattern in MDF to route your trem cavity, you won't go wrong. if you go by trial and error on your body, you have about a 95% chance of screwing it up. One of my guitars became firewood back in the day as I was trying to route a trem cavity by clamping straight edges and only doing 1 edge at a time. Not a good idea.

[ibanez_crazy]

aside fromt he advice to search and , i would strongly second the last advice.. MAKE TEMPLATES.. if you make the perfect pattern in MDF to route your trem cavity, you won't go wrong.  if you go by trial and error on your body, you have about a 95% chance of screwing it up.  One of my guitars became firewood back in the day as I was trying to route a trem cavity by clamping straight edges and only doing 1 edge at a time.  Not a good idea.

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[ibanez_crazy]

I figured on a 80 percent chance of getting sawdust in my eye, rushing out of my workshop and cracking my head on the way out. Thanks for your help. I sure dont want a piece of 40 dollar firewood.