I'm Hesitant To Start This Thread, But...

[IWishICouldShred]

I'm doing my first from-scratch build-- a LP double-cut styled electric.

After much debate and eventually some time wandering around the lumber store, my plan evolved into a semi-final iteration, which is what I'm working by at the moment.

This guitar is going to have a double-cut Les Paul shaped body, but I'm not going exactly by the plans. In fact, I didn't get any plans. I just traced a single cut 1970's Japanese Les Paul rip off I had laying around and improvised from there. That's what music's all about, right?

Anyway, this is going to be a bolt-on neck with an Ibanez styled neck joint. I love the feeling of a well-contoured neck joint as opposed to a traditional 'steel plate' bolt-on or a regular set neck. Plus, I have a large collection of refernce material that I can take apart, measure, and otherwise probe to learn its secrets.

I also decided early on that this would be a flat top-- I'm not ready for a full carve yet.

In any case, with the shape out of the way, I had to pick out materials. Coming out of a long stretch messing around with auto body and paint techniques, I was originally set on an airbrushed finish or something similar (Low-Rider style fingerprint striping, rediculous Kandy Kolor flames, etc.) but I changed my mind.

Why?

Simple shape

bolt-on neck

flat top

and i'm going to hide my wood, too?

No. This guitar needs to show some grain!

So what kind of wood am I using?

Well, pics will follow in a second. Before I finalized my decision for the wood, I started looking at my budget. It is not large.

My final decision was to build 2 guitars and sell one to cover the cost. By building 2 at once, I'm saving myself time and cost on parts and shipping, as well as gaining twice the experience!

I picked out all my parts (black powdercoated TOM bridge, tailpiece, tuners, straplocks, jack plate, knurled knobs, and plastic pickup rings and switch, all from GFS... truss rods from StewMac, and fretwire from Grizzly. Nut from guitar center.) and before pickups, allowing $100 for wood, my budget looks like it will be right in the neighborhood of $300 USD. Not bad at all.

So as for wood, I walked into the lumber store with plans for a 6/4" poplar body with a 1" purple heart top, for a total cost of about 50 bucks. I walked out with this--

a pair of 1" x 12" x 24" purple heart boards for the tops.

A 1" x 6" x 48" spalted maple board for laminating between purple heart pieces in the top.

A 1" x 9" x 9' foot northern ash board, which will be cut up and joined to make 2 piece backs for both guitars.

Total cost for this was around $80

I found a guy on craigslist.org who's going to sell me a rock maple board which will be enough to build the "sandwich" segments of 2 necks, I just need one more piece of purple heart to laminate between them. The maple piece will be $10, and the PH should be cheap because I just need a half-inch thickness or so.

There's a store around here that sells 1/8" x 3" x 24" exotic wood blanks. I don't know what their intention is, but I'm gonna buy myself a bloodwood or ebony fretboard for under 15 bucks.

Oh, I almost forgot. Pictures!

Here's my spalted maple. I checked it for soft/punky sections, and this board is relatively hard. I picked through a few dozen to find it.

Here's my purple heart. These 2 boards are exactly the same size, so the first picture is very misleading

And here's the ash. Very nice, open grain. I think I might do a purple/black "Voodoo" finish on the back of the guitar, to compliament the PH on the front.

Lastly, here's my basic outline, awaiting further planning. This will be a H/H setup with a TOM bridge, but I don't know a whole lot from there.

What do you guys think?

[IWishICouldShred]

Of course, 10 pics per post.

ok, here's the outline.

There we go

[Xanthus]

Eh, it's a little on the pinker side to me. I thought that purpleheart leaned more to the darker.

But to each his own

I'm a bit confused, even after reading through the post a couple times, where exactly each type of wood is going.... Specifically the spalted maple.

And with such a low budget, you're expected to spend the rest of it on Bareknuckle pickups!!! :D

[anderekel]

Cool, I like the spalted board.

Xanthus, from what I can tell, the ash is gonna the body. The purpleheart and spalt are gonna be the top, purple/spalt/purple, side by side. That's what I gathered anyway.

[zyonsdream]

Have fun with the purple heart! Tough as hell. Seems like an ambitious build for a first go-around!

[IWishICouldShred]

I probably should have explained the top more clearly. anderekel had the right idea, sort of.

The problem with doing PH /Spalt/PH would be that I'd be relying on the spalted maple to rout perfectly for my neck joint and pickups, and withstand the tension of the bridge. I might be crazy, but I'm not that crazy. It's basically going to go PH/ SM / PH / SM / PH, with the spalted maple parts being a 1-2" strip down the body lengthwise, starting about an inch to each side of the bridge.

As for pickups, I'm definitely going to find some ebay or craigslist EMG's for the one I keep! The one I sell, I'm not too sure... if I get someone on board before the guitar is finished, I'll just charge them retail for whatever pickups they want and call it an 'option'.

[Supernova9]

I probably should have explained the top more clearly. anderekel had the right idea, sort of.

The problem with doing PH /Spalt/PH would be that I'd be relying on the spalted maple to rout perfectly for my neck joint and pickups, and withstand the tension of the bridge. I might be crazy, but I'm not that crazy. It's basically going to go PH/ SM / PH / SM / PH, with the spalted maple parts being a 1-2" strip down the body lengthwise, starting about an inch to each side of the bridge.

As for pickups, I'm definitely going to find some ebay or craigslist EMG's for the one I keep! The one I sell, I'm not too sure... if I get someone on board before the guitar is finished, I'll just charge them retail for whatever pickups they want and call it an 'option'.

Please God don't try and sell this guitar while you're still making it.

[zyonsdream]

I probably should have explained the top more clearly. anderekel had the right idea, sort of.

The problem with doing PH /Spalt/PH would be that I'd be relying on the spalted maple to rout perfectly for my neck joint and pickups, and withstand the tension of the bridge. I might be crazy, but I'm not that crazy. It's basically going to go PH/ SM / PH / SM / PH, with the spalted maple parts being a 1-2" strip down the body lengthwise, starting about an inch to each side of the bridge.

As for pickups, I'm definitely going to find some ebay or craigslist EMG's for the one I keep! The one I sell, I'm not too sure... if I get someone on board before the guitar is finished, I'll just charge them retail for whatever pickups they want and call it an 'option'.

Please God don't try and sell this guitar while you're still making it.

Seriously, I don't think I've ever seen anyone happy enough with thier first build to sell it. I look back on my first couple (when I can get myself to bring them out of hiding) and I would never sell them: not that anyone would want them. However, that was before the internet caught onto custom guitar building. The resources are ginormous now so good luck to you but I'd wait until you have the finished project until you offer it up for sale.

[fryovanni]

How will you know if this guitar you plan to sell is going to be a competantly build instrument? From reading your thread and noting your selection of wood, it would seem that you are not building using traditional guidence, or solid understanding of wood. How solid is your understanding of the functional design aspects of an instrument? I am not going to harp on this, but I would focus on learning and developing your skills. Stop focusing on cheap materials, and selling what you do not know how to build yet. Stay on the task of learning and developing skills, you may have a chance at building a halfway decent guitar that way(your likely heading down the road to having major functional flaws, and poorly fit and finished bits and pieces).

FWIW,

Rich

[IWishICouldShred]

I appreciate the advice. I guess what I said earler must have seemed kind of rash, so please allow me to explain.

This isn't a "first buld" in the traditional sense. I've done pretty much everything to a guitar EXCEPT the major woodworking aspects of it-- set ups, a ton of painting, hardware installation, invasive appearance mods, some wiring, basic fretwork, whatever else. When I say "sell one", it's not like I'm advertising it and calling myself a luthier or saying that this is anything that it's not-- the people I'd ask to consider buying would be friends of mine who've seen and trust my work, and would be interested in having some involvement in what they got as the end result. The price would absolutely not be anything NEAR what the real luthiers in this area charge-- they'd be paying for what it is, which is a first build, a learning experience, but hopefully a damn good guitar. Hopefully.

I've been happy enough with my previous work to show it off-- the local newspaper just ran a full page story with a big picture of me playing a guitar I built from parts and painted, with my name on the headstock. The story was about a guitar class I've been teaching at my old high school, and as a teacher, an understanding of the functional design aspects is essentially requisite knowledge-- students ask questions about it, and it's part of my job to be able to answer them. I've done everything from a basic intonation to making my own fret scale, accurate to .001", with a set of dial calipers.

With that said, compared to most of you guys, I know very little. However, there is a local builder who has been kind enough to share his knowledge when I run into things I can't handle. In addition, there are a couple of guys I know with woodworking shops who have also agreed to help me out if I need it. There will be things I run into during this build that I'm not prepared for and don't know how to do, however, having real people on hand who know more than I do has made me confident enough to take this project on.

Does that seem a little less crazy?

[IWishICouldShred]

OH!

I found the right word for how I'm using the spalted maple. I guess you'd call it a pair of "stringers", but slightly thicker... maybe 2" or so.

[fryovanni]

Fair enough, I look forward to seeing your progress, and hope it runs out well.

[IWishICouldShred]

Update:

I've enlisted the aid of a local carpenter who specializes in glockenshpiels. I'm not making this up. Anyway, the gentleman is a master of his trade and was excited to help out with the build.

Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera to the shop so you'll have to make do with a cell phone picture until I go back next week to cut out the body.

Today we cut up the boards I brought. You'll be able to pick all of this out in the picture, hopefully. The center section of each top is a 4" wide piece of purple heart. On either side of this is a tapered piece of spalted maple, which starts at 1" at the top of the blank and widens out to about 2 1/4" at the bottom. We cut the opposite angle into the purple heart wings, which are glued outside the spalted maple.

Everything went through the joiner, and then we glued it up. In the picture, everything is harder to pick out, because we clamped both bodies together. We are obviously not gluing the 2 bodies together, but you'll see 9 stripes. Don't be fooled-- the 2 pieces of purple heart in the middle just blend together a little.

In addition, we cut the ash down to length, matched the grain as best we could to hide the join, glued that as well. This was not photographed, but I'll get a shot of it next time.

So here's the picture

[Pyroiguana]

What made you decide to taper the spalted maple?

Also, it would be nice to see a birds eye view of the top. I'm curious to see how it works with the shape.

Glockenspiels, huh? It seems like a rather simple instrument to specialize in, but I'm sure he could prove me wrong XD

[IWishICouldShred]

What made you decide to taper the spalted maple?

Also, it would be nice to see a birds eye view of the top. I'm curious to see how it works with the shape.

Glockenspiels, huh? It seems like a rather simple instrument to specialize in, but I'm sure he could prove me wrong XD

I was messing around with different ideas on how to use the spalt, and I just kind of started drawing. The instrument almost has a natural taper to it already; there's so much unused space at the ass end of a Les Paul-type guitar, I thought it would be cool to expand the spalted maple in that area to show off the figure a little bit more.

Edited June 28, 2008 by IWishICouldShred

[anderekel]

I like that taper idea, that's cool. It'll be interesting to see how this ends up

[IWishICouldShred]

Haven't cut the body yet... but that will happen next time I'm near a bandsaw!

Today I went down to woodcraft and picked up a pair of beautiful Bloodwood fretboard blanks.

One is perfectly flat, quartersawn, and has a quasi-figure. In good light, it almost looks like a flame type figure running the length of the board. 3" x 24" x 3/8"... $10.99

The other is flatsawn but not 100% true so I'll have to run it through a joiner to flatten a side and then thickness it with a planer. 3" x 24" x 1/2", cost $13.99

Oh yeah, I got a 10% student discount! How's that for building on a budget? That's about the cost of 1 rosewood fretboard blank plus shipping from Stewmac.

The picture I got before my batteries croaked is of the nicer one, but it's crappy light. And out of focus

In buying the bloodwood, I ran into a crazy idea for the finish on these monsters.

Red stain on the spalted maple and ash to match the bloodwood fretboard. This should contrast nicely with the purple heart.

If I get really ambitious, I'll do a purpleheart/bloodwood/purpleheart neck, but I don't know if I'm man enough to carve it!

Bloodwood ranks near the top of the Janka hardness scale-- slightly softer than Ipe and Ebony, but harder than Bubinga, Jatoba, Wenge, Purpleheart, Rosewood, Paduak, etc.

In better perspective, it takes twice as much power to punch a hole in Bloodwood as it does Rock Maple.

Also, with this new color scheme, I think I'm going to do gold hardware rather than black.

Thoughts?

Edited July 5, 2008 by IWishICouldShred

[IWishICouldShred]

Quick update, I'll post pictures tomorrow--

I consulted with a luthier this morning who's going to show me how to make this a set neck and help me make up some routing templates.

After this, I went and bought some wood for the neck- More purple heart and maple. The necks will be 3-piece laminates, Maple/PH/Maple, with a bloodwood fretboard. It sounds strange but it looks sexy!

Photos coming soon

[travismoore]

Nice wood combo!

Keep us posted =D

[IWishICouldShred]

Alright, I've made more progress but it's slow going right now, as I haven't done most of this and don't have the tools required.

Plans are changing slowly, but, I'll get to that in a moment.

I left off with gluing up the blanks, so I'll get back to it there.

Last weekend I took the clamps off and found myself with 2 nicely formed bodies and 2 sweet matching tops. After about... I'd say 4 million passes on the belt sander, they were flat and looked pretty good.

Here's the ash body blank, post sanding but pre cutting, with the outline drawn on

And here's the purple heart/spalt, in similar condition

Here's one of the PH tops after cutting

I'm pretty happy with the way the tapered spalted pieces came out.

What I'm not happy with is the thickness I lost. This guitar will not have much of a carve, but it BARELY makes it to 1.5" now. I'd like to get it a little bigger, so I might go with a dark veneer between the ash and purple heart, which would actually like like binding in the joint from the side. The ash is going to be chambered anyway, so it might give it an interesting sound. 1/4" rosewood or something similar might be nice.

Anyway, moving on to the necks. I bought some straight grained rock maple and another purple heart board. Due to limited sizing, I bought too much, and I may end up being able to make an extra pair of bolt-on necks from what I don't use. At least one will get sold (my friend really wants one).

I bought 4; 4/4 boards, 6" width by 30" length; in maple, and 2 of the same dimensions in PH

So I've made a M/PH/M sandwich for each neck. This gives me a lot of room for error and, like I said, I may be able to make a pair of bolt-on necks once I'm done for other projects or to recoup some expenses. The neck wood was 50 bucks total, but again, the 2 necks I needed, plus possibly 2 more and whatever I can sell them for, plus the experience of making 4 necks! Sounds good to me. Buying in quantity has been working well so far.

Anyway, here is one of the blanks glued up. This thing must weigh 10-12 lbs, and even more with all the clamps on it. A veritible "brick sh!thouse of tone".

And here's a lovely front view for all of you

This week, those blanks went through the jointer and I made a template to cut them out. Wednesday, I'll be back in the shop to cut them out and rout for truss rods. I might also be able to slot the fretboards and start making my routing template for the body.

I've got some PH scraps sitting around to glue on for headstock wings, so the headstock will actually match the body, PH/M/PH/M/PH sandwich. How sexy is that?

After that, there's a lot of sanding and shaping I can do at home, so I'll have more frequent updates.

I've also decided to stick with a more natural finish for now... I'm seriously considering buying some PH fretboard blanks and saving the bloodwood for another project (now that I'm addicted...), but I don't know.

Anyway, in other news, I think I'm gonna mess around with hand-winding some pickups for one of these. I've got a friend who's an engineering student and seemed really interested when I started explaining pickup winding to him, so we might mess around with it and see what happens.

I've also got a set of EMG's sitting around in an axe I rarely play, so I'll probably throw some GFS pickups in that and steal the EMG's for this build.

[kpcrash]

I know you're hooked on EMG, but with the color combo - how would some purple EVOs look in there? (just a thought - please don't flame the messenger)

[IWishICouldShred]

I thought it might be kind of cool to do gold pickup covers to match the hardware, but what about a pair of purple bobbin toppers on the emgs? It would look really fake but it might be awesome.

EDIT: Oh yeah. I'm building a guitar.

I slotted the first fretboard, and I practiced shaping another neck for someone's stalled project before I cut these out. Some minor workshop flooding due to a big storm impeded bandsaw usage, so I couldn't cut the necks out yet

Edited July 26, 2008 by IWishICouldShred

[IWishICouldShred]

So anyway I was building this guitar, right...?

I totally forgot about you, PG Forum! No offense I didn't mean to.

So here's the deal-- Work has continued on a weekly basis for the last 6 months. Being at school for most of that time has kind of cramped my style, but I worked my study of luthierie into an independent study class for this semester so now I can justify spending more time with it. In addition, the music department wants to send me to Kalamazoo to check out the Heritage factory. And they say there are no field trips in college

Also, I'm trying to get pics of progress into my photobucket account but I can't remember the password. I've got quite a bit of progress to show but you'll probably be disappointed anyway-- after 6 months this thing should be done. The important thing is that after routing the body, all of the operations I'll be doing are things I've already learned on other instruments so they should go much faster.

Now the really good news-

Remember how I said at the top of the thread that I wanted to make 2 of these and sell one? I took everyone's advice and decided to do one at a time. I'm glad I did. BUT! A friend of the luthier who has been teaching me came by the shop, saw my project and the extra wood I had laying around for the second build I never did, and commissioned me to build a body for a neck he's already got!

Expect further delays as I juggle the pair of projects, but this one should be done by May or thereabouts. I'll put up pictures whenever I get back into my photobucket account!

[IWishICouldShred]

Alright! Here's the first update of many more to come

First I need some "Thinking Music"! Benny Goodman ought to do.

This project has turned into a tremendous learning experience for me. Another student and me have been working with a luthier every Saturday afternoon for a few hours, learning each process used in making these axes... first the hard way, then any shortcuts...

So when we left off, I had the body parts cut out and the necks glued up.

First I'll go over some design changes I made...

The bodies weren't quite thick enough... just under 1.5", so we found a nice piece of maple and cut it to size to use as a center piece. On the outside, the theory was that it would just look like decorative binding and it would expand the depth of the body by about 1/4".

Well, then I realized the body was starting to get ridiculously heavy. What to do?

The center piece became a router template--

There it is with some blocks attached for height.

I cut holes in the laminate and dropped the router through with a follower bit. Then, using some dial calipers, a steady hand, and a healthy respect for any power tools with more horsepower than my lawnmower, I routed both the top and the back about 3/8" each. All together, there's a 3/8" cavity in each side plus the 1/4" center laminate, so there are a pair of 1" hollow chambers in the body now. Check out the assembly--

^ The ash back piece being routed

^ Close up of the same. You might notice the strip down the center section of the center laminate. This is for wiring to pass through. It's great because if I pull the pickups out once the guitar is done, it should look like a square hole.

"How'd you drill that square hole?"

"Square drill bit."

What a conversation piece, right?

^ Here's the purple heart being routed.

^ The first half of the gluing process. Think I've got enough clamps on there? The cam clamps in the center worked pretty well but that's one tool I never want to use again.

Here's the whole thing glued up and ready for the huge amount of sanding I've been doing. Next step is to take a rounded-off follower bit around the edge and then sand it some more.

That's basically where the body stands right now. It needs to get routed and have some shaping done but from there it's mostly pretty simple... I'll be making the router templates soon.

I'm going with a pretty straight-forward long tenon design. The neck angle is going to be cut right into the neck tenon rather than routed into the body, cause, as bad as I am with the bandsaw, it's easier to err on the side of caution with the bandsaw than the router.

Next post - the neck!

[IWishICouldShred]

Next major design change--

The the bloodwood fretboard looks sexy on its own, but awful with the purple heart. Bright red and purple? What was I thinking?

So after spending a couple of weekends learning to slot, lay out, taper, radius, and put position markers on that board, I got a new Purpleheart blank from Woodcraft for about $9.

Here is is slotted. I tapered it 3 weeks ago but had a little "oops" with the bandsaw

I had a meeting at work last weekend so I couldn't get anything done, but I spent this past saturday re-laying out my center line and all that and hand sanding it to size. Another hour or so of sanding and it'll be about ready to go on to radiusing.

There was just enough wood left on there to get the dimensions I wanted. We had a large blade on there for cutting the neck blanks down a while back, and it ate this thinner sock right up.

So that needs sanding on the sides to fix the taper, radiusing to 15", and brass dots on the side. The board is going to be 1 3/4" at the nut, which is about 1/16 wider than a board that most people would consider "wide", but I've got pretty big hands and love the space I get with a big Jackson style fretboard.

Anyway, back to the neck. When we left off, it was still a solid block of wood that I described as a "brick sh!thouse of tone". I took that block and cut it in half with the table saw, and gave half to the other student I'm working with so that he could use it on his project. Returning to my half, I routed the truss rod slot and a wider slot for allen-key access.

Above shows the truss rod slot, the access hole, and the peghead face. I cut the peghead angle into the neck blank with the bandsaw and sanded it flat with a block. This pic shows after the sanding and all that, and shows the outline of the template that I made for the neck. Note the volute for strength!

Now, speaking of the volute, those curves are tough to cut through 3" of hardwood, so I put some big holes in it with a reamer to make the cutting easier.

Which is good, cause I need all the help I can get when it comes to this damn bandsaw. Can't blame the tool-- I'm just not good at it yet.

There we have the relief holes. There's a 3rd one back by the heel. Apologies for the horrendous contrast.

There's a halide light in the workshop that goes on sometimes, and it has that sort of effect.

And here's my bandsaw expertise in action

Better to leave more wood on there than take it off! I might suck with the saw but I'm handy enough with the rasp.

So after cutting the rest of the neck out (much more smoothly thankfully), I added some big ol peghead wings to the sides. Like I said, I can always cut more wood off, and I'd rather do that than add it.

So the neck itself needs to be tapered and have the tenon and headstock cut out, then it's ready for gluing. I guess I'm to attach the neck before I shape it, apparently that makes it easier to give it a natural shape.

Another design consideration that we've made-- the neck will be "pulled out" on this guitar in the interest of upper fret access and balance. Thus, the neck will hit the body right about where the 22nd fret sits. I can get a very natural contour on the heel this way. Plus the body is very heavy, so moving the neck back moves the center of balance toward the headstock a bit more. Hopefully this guitar will not "dive" in either direction.

Ah... what else?

I settled on EMGs and pulled them out of the other guitar I mentioned.

Been doing a little bit of wood carving and guitar setup work in the interim. I can't wait to get more of my own tools so I can do this 5 or 6 days a week instead of 1.

Thanks for being patient everybody! I promise I'm not an unfinisher-- this guitar must be done by May because I've secured an independent study. I'm getting 2 (possibly 4... gotta meet with some Profs this week and hammer out the details) credits for building this guitar and writing a paper on the design and construction methods I used, which I'm really excited about.

As for the commision--

We've still got to hammer out the details but it looks like what I have to do is:

Take a 24 fret Showmaster neck and cut it down to 22 frets so the rhythm pickup will sit in the "sweet spot"

Get the Squier decals off the headstock. Put the dude's name on there

Rout my surplus body to accomodate this neck and a pair of P-90's, plus a control cavity for 3 pots and a 3 way toggle.

Hook the whole thing up with mint hardware (Black locking schallers, black Badass bridge, black knurled knobs, etc)

Hand it off to a couple of friends who do auto-body stuff for clearcoating and buffing

Assemble!

The guy said he wants some top notch P90's in it so I believe we're ordering from Fralin, but does anyone else have any favorites? I think we're looking on the hot wound side cause this body will be very bright to begin with.