Thinner Les Paul

[VesQ]

After I glued maple top on les paul I´m building i noticed it´s kind a heavy. Drilling any weight relief holes didn´t come into my mind until now. But it´s too late for that. Top is uncarved...yet. So I still have a chance to push body through planer.

Body is about 58mm thick, top 18mm and mahogany 40mm thick. Neck pocket is about 38mm deep. I was thinking that I could take 10 mm off from the bottom. Would that be too much ?

[Xanthus]

There not is really one correct answer to your question. You can make the body as thick or as thin as you want, but yeah, in my opinion 58mm is a bit thick. What you COULD do is plane that 10mm off the bottom, and then use a router to make some chambers to reduce the weight of the body. Something like this. Afterwards, you could glue a thin back onto the Les Paul and proceed as normal. If you could get a maple back to glue on, that might look really nice, too. Or if you're going to be painting the back a solid color, the wood appearance wouldn't matter.

The procedure would actually be really simple, too, because the top isn't carved, so you have a nice surface to rest it on.

[westhemann]

The reason a les paul should be thicker than other guitars is because of the balance issue.It does not have an upper horn,so without that mass the neck takes a dive to the floor.

You could use denser woods to make up for that...I reccomend bubinga

[VesQ]

Good point Wes. I didnt think that guitar would become nose diving if i´d remove some wood. only thing I thought about was, will all the electronics and switches fit in after thinning guitar body.

The original idea was to make a les paul less heavy by thinning it. Badly tittled topic and I´m sorry for that.

Drilling some holes from the back and gluing some kind of cap seems pretty cool idea. It would probably look nice with transparent finish, but the amount of work and money doing it doesn´t get me intrested.

[Daniel Sorbera]

I built a guitar a while back that was only 1" thick. With a little planning it can be done. The biggest problem was the neck pocket, so I did a neck through instead..

[carousel182]

godin generally how deep should a neck pocket be and how much space should be left on the bottom at the bottom. i have a 1 and 1/4 body cut out is that too thin?