Leaderboard

It is difficult to construct an electric guitar without reaching for the router. Control and pickup cavities, neck pockets and tremolo recesses are all operations that require the use of this versatile tool, and all of these examples are made much easier and safer by the use of a template and an inverted pattern bit to guide the router around the intended cut. One routing pattern that can be difficult to execute accurately is for a Floyd Rose Original tremolo, particularly the recessed version whereby the arm can be raised or lowered above and below its equilibrium point. The follow

This is the first of an occasional series of tutorials covering tips and techniques for those of us who have limited facilities for building and finishing guitars and basses but nevertheless still wish to produce results that are fit for purpose and perfectly respectable - even when pitched against those produced in fully-equipped guitar building shops. This first tutorial covers wipe-on varnishing. Overview Gloss finishing of a guitar or bass can be daunting for the Bedroom Builder with visions of spray booths, compressors, burnishing wheels and high degrees of skill. With the

This tutorial is intended as a supplemental to Chris Verhoeven's "The Comprehensive Guide To Body Template Making" article here on ProjectGuitar.com; Chris' tutorial describes techniques for taking a printed design applied to a surface (in his instance, glued to thin sheet stock) and shaping that before transferring it to thicker and more permanent material. Presented here is an alternative method of taking a design printed in real-world sizes from your CAD package to that first bit of template stock. Chris' method is simple; print out your design and glue it to the sheet stock. Most peop

Several commercial luminescent marker products are available. Off-the-shelf solutions (such as those from Luminlay) are available in several sizes or raw sheet, costing upward of USD$20-30 plus shipping for enough to do a full instrument. A more temporary solution exists in the form of pre-made stickers that fit over existing inlays or sheets of adhesive-backed vinyl that can be cut to whatever shape you please. For relatively little expense, it is laughably easy to make several sets of your own high intensity luminescent inlays, even making sizes and shapes not commercially available

Set-Up and Use of the Guitars & Woods (G&W) Fretboard Miter Box 1. Introduction The guide will cover: An overview of how the miter box is used Obtaining a square initial datum (generally needed for first use only) Mounting the unit on a bench or board Setting the blade width (generally needed for first use only, unless a different saw is subsequently used) Setting the height of cut (done for each new blank fretboard) Locking the above settings, ready for fret slotting (done for each new blank fretboard) Preparing the fretboard for us

I'm impatient usually. A proper hemi-semi fretwork detailing takes 2-3 times as long as this method, but hey! Practice makes perfect, and if you are willing to spend that extra time then it's always worth it, and very satisfying So here's my hackjob tutorial. You will need: Enough fretwire to do a fretThe correct profile crowning file for that fretwireA small fine flat-faced file (no technical names here)Abrasive foam pads (I use 180 grit and 240 grit)Good lighting (and a white paper work surface)Also useful: Good lightingClean work areaMicromesh pads (grades up to 2400 preferably)Fret tang n

I just finished up a build that called for direct mounted pickups. I wanted these to be adjustable but more importantly I also wanted to preserve the threads in the pickup baseplate tab threads that normally get screwed up or drilled out by using regular wood screws to mount the pickups just in case I ended up pulling them out for any reason. I ended up using 2-56 Brass screw-to-expand inserts along with matching half inch 2-56 thread pan head screws from McMaster-Carr. These simply press into an eight inch pilot hole and are reinforced with a drop of CA glue. These screws are slight

"Vintage style" truss rods are highly effective whether they are configured as a bending rod or simply as a compression rod. In spite of many alternative designs working around their shortcomings, the original is still often regarded as the best by many builders. Whilst I won't be weighing in on that lengthy debate, from practical standpoint "simple, inexpensive and effective" are worth the cost of entry alone. This article was written to be a suitable blend of comprehensiveness and brevity....if you remain unsure about certain areas, leave comments below or ask over in the forums. O

Commercially-made routing templates for humbuckers are easy to find from virtually all good luthiery supply outlets these days. They're a fantastic turnkey solution for carrying out this common task. Beyond the "standard" sizes, templates for larger pickups are thin on the ground meaning that we end up making them ourselves. Standard or not, the process of making a template for any humbucker-style pickup is the same and it's not a huge leap to tweak the dimension to fit a variety of pickup sizes such as mini humbuckers, etc. Pickups fitted into pickguards or under a pickup ring don't

A recent addition to the ProjectGuitar.com workshop was a new mitre slotting box from Guitars and Woods (G&W). Like any tool, integrating a fret slotting box into your workshop and usage methods benefits from a few tweaks. Straight out of the box, it is a useful and powerful tool (read our review here!). What more can we do to it? The base of the box is pre-drilled and countersunk to accept three screws or bolts so that you can affix it to your work surface or a larger baseboard. I opted to go for the second approach. The mitre box itself is just over 105mm/4" wide (I went for the wid

"Hi to everybody! I've made a custom headless guitar. It's a very compact guitar but it's about 2cm wider than a Stratocaster at its widest point. The result is that it does not fit in a standard Stratocaster case. I bought a Jaguar hardcase but it's exaggeratedly long for my guitar. I've made a compact, travel friendly guitar and I have to use an enormous case. I was quite disappointed so I decided to build my own case. I decided to document the entire process in order to make a tutorial that will be useful to those who want to challenge themselves in the construction of their own c

This tutorial is an update on the original by @Brian - all credit goes to him! I bought a cheap Alder body from eBay for a great price, however I wanted to fit a hardtail bridge instead of a vintage six-screw tremolo like it was set up for. The patient whilst I was sanding off the original finish and bad veneer: The plan of action is to rout out the tremolo cavities into accurately-sized rectangles and fit matching pieces of Alder without any gaps. Firstly, I located some Alder with roughly the same grain ring orientation as the body itself. The body is two-piece so

The usual caveats apply here. Don't attempt anything unless you have sufficient experience and knowledge to do so safely. Unplug electrical equipment before considering working on their internals. Don't wear loose clothing or allow untied long hair near belts! "So anyway I have this Craftsman Drill press I was given, but I already had a floor drill press. So I posted it on Craigslist but after a month no takers what to do with it. Well I was half asleep and the thought popped in my head, "Hey why not make it the buffing station you need". So I said well that a damn fine idea....." So the on