Bedroom Builders - Jaguar build

[sebbeklang]

So about 10 years ago I started two guitar projects and two threads on this forum. I finished the first one this summer and started looking at my second project, the LP junior double neck. The problem was that I've since bought a 12 string electric and have no need for another one! So I decided to try my hand at another guitar I've been craving - a Jaguar. Here we go!

Here is where I left that build at. Two necks and a body blank all roughly cut out to shape. One of the fretboards got one pass too much in the planer and is only like 5mm thick, which is just a little bit less than what I'm comfortable with. Maybe I'll have to get a new fretboard for it, but for this build I used the good one. The body was almost big enough to become a Jaguar, I only had to glue on a piece for the horn.

The rest of the build took place in my apartment and on my balcony, mostly done with hand tools. Hence the title, stolen from the andyjr1515 varnishing tutorial (Which I also used for this project. Incredibly useful - thanks for making this guitar happen!)

For this project I actually (somewhat) finished the build before posting the thread, so I'll get right on to the finished product in this post and add one or two posts with the progress later (or rather hacks for building stuff without a proper workshop, ranging from genius to incredibly stupid and dangerous).

Here it is!

On my previous build I got some nice comments about the headstock so I decided to make this one like that as well. I'm not a huge fan of the fender style headstocks and the head was already angled so it made sense. I quite like how it looks, especially with paint just on the front face.

The setup isn't entirely done and the high E string keeps snapping, but the other five strings sound and feel really nice so far! I also managed to get something wrong with the wiring on both tone pots - they also affect the volume. More on that when I get around to posting the wiring progress!

Specs:
Mahogany body
Bolt on mahogany neck
Rosewood fretboard, 10" radius
Jaguar Alnico 5 pickups, standard wiring + series mod (also quadruple volume pots as mentioned above)
Chrome hardware, gotoh tuners and a lovely tort pickguard
Body/head finish is airbrushed acrylic paint (don't forget to always keep the door closed when you use your bathroom as a spray booth) and the Andy wipe-on varnish
Neck finish is a satin hard wax oil - super happy with this, it looks and feels amazing.

Have a nice day and lots of love to you all for all the inspiration! 

[mistermikev]

bedroom builders... sounds like a club I'd like to join.  tech I'm a garage/office builder but I'll assume your membership requirements are flexible.  

looks like a lot of fun in the making.  immediately I'm thinking draw out the shape, do a straigh cut outside the shape using a straight edge to get a glue surface for the donor, cut a straight line for the horn... rough cut out the donor patch and glue on.  sure a lot easier working in a straight edge on a large piece than fiddling with it once it's a small cutoff.  small pieces are always were I get into trouble anyway.  

rawk on.

[Bizman62]

I very much like your attitude regarding the headstock! Since it's not a carbon copy of a Jag, why bother copying the parts you don't like...

Per the 5 mm thick (thin) fretboard, you can always add a veneer on the bottom side to make it thicker! A contrasting stripe with side dots on it could be quite fancy!

[sebbeklang]

19 hours ago, mistermikev said:

looks like a lot of fun in the making.  immediately I'm thinking draw out the shape, do a straigh cut outside the shape using a straight edge to get a glue surface for the donor, cut a straight line for the horn... rough cut out the donor patch and glue on.  sure a lot easier working in a straight edge on a large piece than fiddling with it once it's a small cutoff.  small pieces are always were I get into trouble anyway.  

Yeah that might have made it slightly easier! I think I would have been able to do it that way. I don't remember what cutoff I ended up using for the horn. Either way, a workbench and a hand plane would have made it a lot better! It's also still a little bit visible even after finish, which I should have fixed  

15 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Per the 5 mm thick (thin) fretboard, you can always add a veneer on the bottom side to make it thicker! A contrasting stripe with side dots on it could be quite fancy!

If only I hadn't already glued it to the neck

[sebbeklang]

Some of the progress has been lost due to me not taking as many pictures as I should have. Hopefully I’ll be able to present a somewhat decent picture of the progress anyway.

Firstly, the body was cut to shape and the horn added. I have a few clamps at home, but nothing big enough to fit an entire guitar length wise, but what I can do is to turn my balcony furniture into a makeshift clamping jig while reversing one of the clamps! I didn’t get a super neat glue line, mostly because I don’t have a hand plane, but it will hold up at least.

 

Another little quirk is that the body I started out with had some channels for wiring routed in between the two 20mm layers of wood. I have no idea if i would have been able to actually get wiring through, but now I never have to find out! Anyway I made two plugs to fill in the holes that ended up on the side of the body and now the guitar counts as chambered I guess.

After rasping out the outline of the body I got out the drill and got some chisels to make the cavities. The 25mm drill bit was not fun to use at all, so slow! The neck pocket was the worst part, as can be expected. I used two small sanding jigs and a caliper to get it good enough, but a router would have saved me a lot of time!

 

Chiseling away for the arm and belly cutouts and the edge radius. This was the most dangerous part as I sometimes chiseled while holding the guitar body with the other hand. I did cut my finger at one point but luckily enough it was just a small cut. If I were to do it again I definitely would have been more patient at this stage. 

 

The neck went through the same process: rasp, saw and chisel for the basic shape, then neck profile with rasp and a spokeshave. I always go for a baseball bat profile, otherwise I’ll be super anxious about it breaking when I tune it up (I still am, a little bit)

 

So anyway, after a bunch of hot summer evenings sanding, rasping and chiseling, I have a guitar shaped piece of wood and half a baseball bat that can be attached to it! At this point in the project I start to dream about moving to a house with a workshop so I don't have to get sawdust everywhere in my living space. 

This concludes the woodworking part of the project, now on to find pictures and write up the finishing/electronics parts!

Edited November 2, 2021 by sebbeklang
fixed font size/style

[Bizman62]

40 minutes ago, sebbeklang said:

If only I hadn't already glued it to the neck

on second thought Fender seems to use thin fretboards. My AmStd looks like 4-5 mm measured at the highest point at the body end.

[Bizman62]

6 minutes ago, sebbeklang said:

I have a few clamps at home, but nothing big enough to fit an entire guitar length wise

A bunch of wedges and a length of rope, possibly assisted by a couple of 60 cm pieces of 2x2" would do the job.

[Andyjr1515]

That finished Jag looks very good

You can do many of the stages with the simplest of tools...just needs a bit of innovative thinking and a decent dollop of effort

[sebbeklang]

So, funny story! The guitar was supposed to be blue/turquoise. I searched the web for a suitable colour and found the pictured tube at a store nearby. Needless to say that’s not at all what it looks like. But I decided it was a sign and went with it since I actually had considered dark green at one point, 

I made a handle/neck cavity piece out of some scraps from a wine bottle rack and tried spraying it on the balcony just holding it. That did not work at all, it was far to heavy and I wasn’t even able to reach all over it. 
Instead I turned my shower cabin into a spray booth, adding hooks from two clothes hangers and vacating a wardrobe for it to dry. As a bonus I got paint dust all over my apartment from not keeping the door closed while spraying. 

As I mentioned before I used the wipe on varnish guide, which worked out nicely with just a little bit of solvent smell in my apartment
 

Checking out the result with the pickguard and hardware. Also the tedious work of leveling and crowning the frets. At this point it was an advantage to work in my bedroom/home office since I was able to watch movies/shows while filing away. The neck turned out really great, way better than on my previous build. One of the most gratifying parts of the project, to notice improvements.

As a side note I got the wiring fixed after a short visit to the electronics forum, I'll write up a wiring progress post next!

 

[Andyjr1515]

1 hour ago, sebbeklang said:

 

Wow!  This looks fantastic!!

Do be careful with DIY spray boothing, though.  You probably already have one, but in case anyone else is reading, as well as plenty of ventilation, you need to use a suitable respirator (with solvent filters, not just dust).  They are not expensive and are, literally, life savers  - this is certainly no time to end up in A&E with a serious respiratory complaint  

 

[sebbeklang]

23 minutes ago, Andyjr1515 said:

Do be careful with DIY spray boothing, though.  You probably already have one, but in case anyone else is reading, as well as plenty of ventilation, you need to use a suitable respirator (with solvent filters, not just dust).  They are not expensive and are, literally, life savers  - this is certainly no time to end up in A&E with a serious respiratory complaint  

Oh yeah, this is a good point. I only ever airbrush water soluble acrylic paints and even then I prefer to do it outdoors. 

[sebbeklang]

I decided not to do anything too funky with the wiring, I'd gotten a pair of fairly standard jaguar style pickups and went with standard wiring, except a mod I found where both pickups in the down position puts them in series.

 

So many wires, at least they all fit! I got some wires with connectors which I thought would make it easier not only to wire everything up, but to be able to easily fix anything that breaks or if I just want to redo it differently at some point. But I opted on just soldering everything, it was a pain to try to decide where the connectors should go and keep track of everything. Hopefully I wont feel a need to rewire anytime soon. I think if I do it'll just be something like changing cap values or similar.

As I mentioned in the first post, both of the tone pots also lowered the volume when used.
I made a thread in electronics and managed to find the culprit, there was a resistor missing in both of the diagrams I’d found! That was the issue for the lead circuit at least, for the rhythm circuit it was correctly wired and also working correctly, I'd probably just been trying it out with too low volume on the amp (how is that possible?!) or something.

Anyway, this is all the progress I have documented. It was a really fun build, I got to try out some new stuff and managed to do better on aspects where my first build was a bit lacking. I definitely want to do more, but I probably wont do any woodworking at home, at least until summer when I can use the balcony. Maybe I'll do a kit to try out some more finishing and wiring, maybe I'll go to this workshop I have fairly nearby, maybe I'll take a break. Who knows! 

Thanks again for all the inspiration