My Second Build - Spruce Telecaster

[D_W]

My first post. I've been looking for a guitar builder's forum, as I always end up getting banned/timeouts from forums that direct traffic to general topic areas. 

This is my second guitar. I'm a hobby tool maker and a friend of mine was a professional toolmaker and instrument maker and got me into guitars (played when I was younger for a decade, and playing again now). 

This guitar is a spruce telecaster type, sitka - solid (not chambered or veneer) with binding and a pine/dammar/turpentine varnish that I made (I don't think I'll do that again on a guitar - I didn't use any artificial driers and it takes a very long time for it to cure if weather on the weekends doesn't provide sunlight without birdcrap or rain). 

Neck is cherry, fingerboard is maple, pickups are a duncan combination (can't remember exactly which - quarter pound maybe - I haven't been keeping my hardware in order because it's sort of an afterthought - I like about anything good, low or high output, whatever, I can live with it). The switch is a 4-way type, and the jack plate i'm sure is not correct for a telecaster, but i like that type. 

My gimmick is that I'm working almost entirely by hand  (it's easier for me) and don't really have much useful in the way of power tools. Outer profile and pickup cavity/binding channel I do with a router, but not much else sees electricity - not even resawing or most drilling. 

Generally happy with this guitar save the nit of the dark spot at the bottom - it's chipout and the binding crept into the chip area - I'll fix it sometime maybe. Staying away from power tools in general probably means that I'll build fewer and less spectacular guitars than most on here. 

[D_W]

Picture from the other side. 

 

Also, I'm looking to make a few les paul specials but haven't been able to find good full size plans for the side neck profile (working by hand, it's nice to lay out the roughing cuts well to save work).  If anyone knows of any, please let me know where I can look. I'm OK with taking measurements off of a guitar in hand if necessary, but plans are nicer to use so that I can make a pattern to mark stock. 

[Bizman62]

58 minutes ago, D_W said:

Staying away from power tools in general probably means that I'll build fewer and less spectacular guitars than most on here. 

I'd say that adds value to your instruments. Also, how should one define spectacularity? Fancy curves aren't an issue for hand tools, neither is highly figurative woods. That Tele there is spectacular in its own right! Solid craftmanship and well chosen pieces of quality wood, matching colours... If it plays as well as it looks there's nothing left to ask for.

[mistermikev]

2 hours ago, D_W said:

Picture from the other side. 

 

Also, I'm looking to make a few les paul specials but haven't been able to find good full size plans for the side neck profile (working by hand, it's nice to lay out the roughing cuts well to save work).  If anyone knows of any, please let me know where I can look. I'm OK with taking measurements off of a guitar in hand if necessary, but plans are nicer to use so that I can make a pattern to mark stock. 

that's a beautiful color combination there.  If one wasn't observant they might miss the tortoise binding.  v nice work!

[D_W]

16 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

that's a beautiful color combination there.  If one wasn't observant they might miss the tortoise binding.  v nice work!

Thanks! It takes a good eye  to see that in these two pictures!! I'm still cutting my teeth on this stuff. I like tortoise, but finding binding and a pickguard that are identical was more than I could come up with. The dots are just cherry, same as the neck. They'll darken over time, but the look is kind of funny for a traditionalist. I guess fender or someone made telecaster style guitars with a spruce top, but none solid spruce. I like the spruce, but sourcing it inexpensively and dealing with chipout in strong cutting machines could be a problem. Spruce is usually light, but this one is dense and the whole guitar is around 8 pounds.

[D_W]

1 hour ago, Bizman62 said:

I'd say that adds value to your instruments. Also, how should one define spectacularity? Fancy curves aren't an issue for hand tools, neither is highly figurative woods. That Tele there is spectacular in its own right! Solid craftmanship and well chosen pieces of quality wood, matching colours... If it plays as well as it looks there's nothing left to ask for.

Thanks, and all good points with other potential elements. Making tool handles (mostly planes) is a good primer for contours on the neck and peghead, shaping a fingerboard, etc, from flat stock and sawing in the frets slots with a dovetail saw, but some of the more machine related things, like inside curves that are 90 degrees to the top of the guitar (or, I guess the entire body is like that) aren't what someone working with hand tools would design. I don't know how fast i'll progress, but I'd like to figure out smart design that is more hand tool oriented (biased off of square one direction or another with compound chamfers or curves to hide imperfect squareness by choosing other proportions. I am only 90% good at design, though - in that I can make something that doesn't quite look good in terms of a collection of design elements, but only know that the last 10% looks bad - without knowing how to make it look good. 

I have worked almost entirely by hand for years now, so it's been a learning experience to buy sanding drums (i don't usually even sand - usually plane and scrape) to speed up the tight inside curve work and get it clean and then use a router to cut control cavities. That's not necessary so much as some of the other things. I had some trouble trying to cut the binding channel by hand on my first guitar and am trying to come up with a design of hand tool that will cut as cleanly as the router does. 

I am not good with power tools, so I always feel like I'm risking disaster when using them. (it does play well - but that's thanks to leo fender mostly, I think - it's a good easy design to start with. My experience with hand tools and building tools puts me further along than the average builder would be on their second guitar - I do not have a gift for good work, just some good experience that transfers over to guitars and hope that more experience will mean better guitars as they get more complicated and unique. 

I'm kind of excited to have finally found a forum that focuses on building, as i tend to get off track in forums that are less on topic. 

[mistermikev]

1 hour ago, D_W said:

Thanks! It takes a good eye  to see that in these two pictures!! I'm still cutting my teeth on this stuff. I like tortoise, but finding binding and a pickguard that are identical was more than I could come up with. The dots are just cherry, same as the neck. They'll darken over time, but the look is kind of funny for a traditionalist. I guess fender or someone made telecaster style guitars with a spruce top, but none solid spruce. I like the spruce, but sourcing it inexpensively and dealing with chipout in strong cutting machines could be a problem. Spruce is usually light, but this one is dense and the whole guitar is around 8 pounds.

funny, even IF you find matching binding and pickguard material (rothko and frost?) once you toss some copper or silver shielding on the back of the pickguard... and glue in the binding channel... probably won't be a perfect match anyway.  had you not said anything i wouldn't have known as I guessed that the binding just was darker due to the fact that you are looking through its depth moreso than the pickguard.  looks great and that's all that matters.  I love the look of spruce.  plan to do either a cedar or spruce tele at some point.

afa hand tools... it appears we are opposites!  I avoid hand tools and try to do everything with the router as it's much easier to get things perfectly symetrical.  I have all sorts of respect for hand tool gurus... and I'm slowly gaining confidence as I carve more necks and do more belly cuts, etc... but still try to use my router wherever possible!  Perhaps we'll learn a little from each other.  Certainly am inspired by your work.

[ScottR]

4 hours ago, D_W said:

My gimmick is that I'm working almost entirely by hand  (it's easier for me) and don't really have much useful in the way of power tools. Outer profile and pickup cavity/binding channel I do with a router, but not much else sees electricity - not even resawing or most drilling. 

I love it!

That's a good looking tele. The spruce really works.

I'd love to see a build thread for your next build. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to see your techniques in hand tool building. I do more hand work than most, but nowhere near as much as you. I'm not ready to hand in my bandsaw.

There's a build in progress around here somewhere that is mostly if not all hand tools and the work is exquisite. Progress has been slow so I'll have to dig for it and see if I can't post you up a link.

Welcome to forum!

SR

[D_W]

I don't usually do a good job of taking pictures, but I've got some pictures from various stages of this build that i"ll see if I can sort out over the next couple of days. I did have a "normal" shop at one point but am just not organized enough for a regular power tool setup. It seems like I'm generally tripping over something or cutting something 1/4th too narrow, or whatever, so I sold my large TS years ago, then I sold my bandsaw about two years ago and have been slowly figuring out how to get some productivity without them. I do have a couple of portable tools, and the drum sander that I located used locally that I thought I'd never have because I hate sanding (have had asthma since childhood and call me cheap, but on larger projects - I built my kitchen cabinets - it just drives me up a wall throwing away tons of sandpaper that's gotten spent when i work faster with planes and a scraper. 

I have much respect for guys who get along with power tools - they just work faster than my brain and I get into ruining stock and having trouble planning. I figure most guys who can really get good accurate power tool setups are the types of folks who also keep neat files at work and have a spotless organized closet in their bedroom. 

The only place I got in trouble on this guitar is the rout between the two pickup routs - a holder on the router bit bearing came loose, wandered, and I hogged a bunch of the template and that cavity got large. Thank goodness it's hidden and relatively meaningless, but a good lesson for a guy like me who doesn't use power tools much now - everything has a learning curve, and you've got to build familiarity with your tools no matter what they are. 

 

 

[D_W]

The start of this build was picking spruce or pine, and I was hoping for a guitar that had some resonance and sort of gave you a tickle while playing it. I'm new to building, but have played off and on and play unplugged a lot. Cheaper lighter guitars tend to be nicer to play unplugged. 

I found this spruce billet on ebay for $50 (which I could hardly believe) and while it doesn't have the even grain of a good acoustic, it's pretty even for an electric guitar. And heavy. About as heavy as cherry - well above the general top end of sitka density (+15% or so? Enough that it's noticeable). 

I no longer have a bandsaw, but even if I did, the one I had could resaw only 12 1/4 inches and I felt like I was always fighting it for wander. 

So for this relatively large billet, surface jointed flat and then smoothed (smoothed only to test the quality of the surface off the plane  -I was told by several people that you couldn't plane it cleanly, but it was fine). . 

then start the resaw with a shop made frame saw (you can see my one power tool purchase since starting to build guitars. I found one of the rigid OSS sanders locally. After my experience with mid grade larger tools (not good), I'm surprised how well it works for something you can find used for $100. ::

[D_W]

Saving the front of this maybe to make a parlor guitar in the future. Resawing a billet like this takes about 25 minutes. If you're in a hurry, that's a long time. If you're not (I'm not), it's not so bad. 

And the two pieces after resawing:

Dense wood, so I was shooting for a final thickness (guessing at this point) a little less than a typical telecaster (the first guitar I built was a cherry telecaster type, so I had dimensions in mind. 

 

[D_W]

sawing out the billet with a turning saw (not really any different than power tools at this point, except to flatten/joint, resaw and saw out this billet probably took about an hour. 

I was warned about chipout on spruce (several people said they wouldn't build with it again, so before deciding whether or not I'd trim the outside with a router and template, I beveled the waste with a spokeshave to try to reduce chipout. 

 

More later .

[ScottR]

That spruce top on a tele gives me a little surprise every time I look at it. It's so unexpected, and yet looks really cool.

Where did you get the blade for your frame saw?

SR

[D_W]

12 minutes ago, ScottR said:

That spruce top on a tele gives me a little surprise every time I look at it. It's so unexpected, and yet looks really cool.

Where did you get the blade for your frame saw?

SR

It's 1095 steel off of a coil. I find good old 8" heavy taper files on ebay and filed teeth into it just over 2 per inch. You can buy the blade and a saw kit, but I made this one out of junk other than the good quality steel. Unfortunately, I made two - the first, trying with a thinner less tall blade, but it wasn't stiff enough for the frame and wandered all over the place. I think this steel is .042" thickness, and the height of the blade is 4".

I anticipated screwing together some offcuts from making my bench (to make the frame) and then making a nicer saw later, but I haven't gotten around to that because it works well, and at the same time, you really only get it out for something wide. The metal fixtures are scrap sheet metal. It really is a mostly junk saw. 

It steers pretty easily with a big wide blade once you get the hang of it (though it would be nice to be able to see the opposite side of the cut - as it is, you take about 30 strokes, walk over, have a look, adjust which way you're steering it and continue to do that. But that keeps you from getting quick and getting in trouble. There's a surprising amount of resistance in the cut in a wide board - it's a workout. 

[ScottR]

Impressive ingenuity. I was going to suggest hanging a mirror at an angle over the back side...but those walks after the 30 strokes, probably help recuperating from the workout.

SR

[mistermikev]

1 hour ago, D_W said:

Saving the front of this maybe to make a parlor guitar in the future. Resawing a billet like this takes about 25 minutes. If you're in a hurry, that's a long time. If you're not (I'm not), it's not so bad. 

And the two pieces after resawing:

Dense wood, so I was shooting for a final thickness (guessing at this point) a little less than a typical telecaster (the first guitar I built was a cherry telecaster type, so I had dimensions in mind. 

 

that is impressive straight.  jeez.  wouldn't even need to plane that (almost).  incredible work.  you are a hand tool samurai!

[D_W]

1 hour ago, mistermikev said:

that is impressive straight.  jeez.  wouldn't even need to plane that (almost).  incredible work.  you are a hand tool samurai!

Laziness promotes competency with hand tools. You're pretty much pointing them at marks, and other than learning things (like the proportion of the blade being key in this situation), it's probably easier to do stuff like this with hand tools early on. It took about one board to learn to steer this saw, and then no issues since then. If it wanders at all, you can feel it - constant feedback. And it's free functional exercise with all kinds of interesting tactile sensations (aggressive teeth on a saw like this feel like pushing something through velcro - you can really feel them doing the work). 

I know it sounds ridiculous to most, but i'm impressed by people who can set up and use power tools consistently without ruining as much stuff as I was ruining. You can go up in quality of tools, I guess, but i went this direction instead. Making guitars with the hand tool skill set is almost ideal because the value vs. the volume of materials is pretty high (vs. something like a book case from rough lumber, though I have done that kind of stuff by hand (completely by hand), too. 

[D_W]

Neck roughing out is similar to any other method, but with the turning saw again, and getting the initial proportions defined is spokeshave and rasp (I like nicholson's milled tooth files - can't remember the name of them - shear cut or something) territory to get room up at the nut end for the spokeshave to get to the line. I got this piece of cherry out of a table slab. It was rift, but again, working by hand, you can sort of cut any orientation out of it without much extra effort - mark the ends and get a quartered piece out. 

A luthier friend warned me to hang neck blanks and roughed necks for a couple of weeks, so I had two of these (still have the other) hanging and chose the one that moved the least. The other one is OK, it cupped end to end and didn't twist, so I'll use it on another guitar. 

 

On to fingerboard. I think it makes a lot of economic sense to use a pre-cut fingerboard blank. 

But I didn't do that. I found a decent piece of birdseye on ebay and sawed it into three blanks. 

[D_W]

After resawing them, I planed the one i'm using to thickness and set it aside, I'll plane the radius onto it later. 

 

(the end of the neck blank sitting there is still flat - planing things by hand makes it important to preserve flat ends to stop against dogs. that cut can be made once everything is definitely final thickness). Couldn't tell you why the drill was on the bench, but it (the bench) ends up being a collection point sometimes, and I'm messy - I clean enough of the bench off for my needs at any given time, and brush the shavings onto the floor to be cleaned up and burned later. 

I ended up routing the outside of the blank, that part is just so much better to do with power tools, and routed a binding channel and the blank and finished it off. For no particular reason, I didn't take pictures of that, but i did it the same way as everyone else did except i remove most of the router flotsam with a scraper before sanding. Most of the drum sanding contact on my guitar bodies is just the inside curves (they're hard to do by hand and get visually perfect). So, the next picture I took was of the body blank.  Very straight except one little "eye" in the grain on the back. I don't care about that, still delighted with this blank for $50. 

 

[D_W]

I wanted to test my varnish on the blank, so that was next. I think varnish is better on violins than guitars, but I had to try it to figure that out for myself. I haven't ventured into japan drier in the varnish, so this is like the stuff violin makers would've used hundreds of years ago, and a lot of them had an area where they could hang violins in the sun. It will dry 90% in 6 hours in the sun, or you can wait three or four weeks inside for enough ambient something or other to do the same thing. I don't want to invest in a light box with UV lights, and attempts to use aquarium bulbs show that they just don't have enough UV output to dry anything more than a spot or two (not a whole blank). The brown bag is a stop loss bag with the varnish - thanks to a tip elsewhere, it should last for a long time in there. It was easy to make, but a fire hazard and needs to be made outside. 

 

[mistermikev]

14 minutes ago, D_W said:

Laziness promotes competency with hand tools. You're pretty much pointing them at marks, and other than learning things (like the proportion of the blade being key in this situation), it's probably easier to do stuff like this with hand tools early on. It took about one board to learn to steer this saw, and then no issues since then. If it wanders at all, you can feel it - constant feedback. And it's free functional exercise with all kinds of interesting tactile sensations (aggressive teeth on a saw like this feel like pushing something through velcro - you can really feel them doing the work). 

I know it sounds ridiculous to most, but i'm impressed by people who can set up and use power tools consistently without ruining as much stuff as I was ruining. You can go up in quality of tools, I guess, but i went this direction instead. Making guitars with the hand tool skill set is almost ideal because the value vs. the volume of materials is pretty high (vs. something like a book case from rough lumber, though I have done that kind of stuff by hand (completely by hand), too. 

you gotta know and work with your strengths I s'pose. 

[D_W]

Very first blank I ever made, I threw away. I squared the sides and faired the curves entirely by hand and was still going to use it, but when I went to try to cut the binding channel with marking knives and chisels, it didn't turn out the way I expected!! I learned a lesson, that it's OK to do everything with hand tools, but it doesn't make sense to do things that are power tool artifacts (roundovers instead of chamfers, tight inside curves, bulk 90 degree cuts around curves instead of biases one way or another) with hand tools, especially if the quality is worse. Maybe on a later telecaster, I'll venture to changing some of the elements to be more hand tool friendly, but didn't want to risk making an ugly guitar guessing wrong. The elements on a gibson SG (chamfers, etc) are more hand tool friendly than roundovers. 

I roughed the pockets out with a router, but again, the chicken theme comes up. I route them short of full depth and size because I know I won't do them accurately with a power tool. Visual prof that I didn't, even after sizing the lateral parts by hand. 

 

I use planemaking tools and a chisel to work the pocket fit into something tighter to the neck blank: The tool that looks like a chisel in this picture just past the end of the pocket is actually a scraper - it's rehardened with no tempering (super hard) and then ground on the front square to the bottom of the chisel to scrape - works well for something like spruce where the grain lifts if you try to run a chisel through the long grain. This isn't particularly time consuming - it takes about 20 minutes to get everything mated well. I haven't built many guitars, but I suspect the sound transfer on a guitar like this doesn't happen at the sides, but between the bottom of the neck and bottom of the pocket. Differential movement between neck and body would prevent ever having a good tight permanent contact at the sides without glue and without risking cracking the pocket in weather changes. 

[D_W]

There was a lack of pictures for a while after this - i didn't take pictures of this guitar intending to show a build, so I didn't get pictures of everything. After this, I:

* marked the frets on the fingerboard blank, then cut them with a dovetail saw (I set the teeth on one to be the right size for fret tangs. I know you can buy a saw already made, but I made some of my saws and know how close they are to the tang groove size, so it wasn't a big deal).

* Planed the initial radius on the fingerboard (10 inches in this case, close to the traditional size)

* cut the mortise for the truss rod in the neck with a sash mortise chisel and router plane (easier than it sounds, and accurate). I used a double action truss rod. I'm sure that's not correct for a telecaster, but back bow isn't that cool, either! This isn't a "correct" instrument end to end. 

* glued the blank to the neck and then proceeded to cut and shape the neck, doing the profile by:

1) draw knife

2) spokeshave/rasp (for the curves)

3) scrape, and then finally once everything was scraped to the appropriate proportion and passed the light test (looking across raking light) lightly sanded the scraped results to remove any scraper marks.

Cherry always gives you the risk of having pitch marks, but this guitar is for me. I'd bet that's commercially unacceptable. This profile is tubby - over 0.9" with fingerboard at the nut end. I may still end up thinning it and removing the varnish that went on later. If you play a while, it's still a little sticky and oil and wax would be nicer. 

Picture of the front before varnish (I planed off the test varnish on the other picture)

[D_W]

Something went wonky with the position of the control plate with the route - I think it's my template vs. most pickguards, so the two gouge cuts just make enough room. I'm sure that would be commercially unacceptable, too!!

Another picture of the fingerboard. lesson learned - if using birdseye for a fingerboard, the figure needs to be really intense from end to end over the whole area. 

[Bizman62]

10 minutes ago, D_W said:

I don't want to invest in a light box with UV lights

How about getting one of those UV sun tanning lamps? Supposedly you might find one of those 60's 300W "alpine sun" lamps next to free in a garage sale.