Since I've finished one of my 6 string basses, it's time to add a new project.
A friend of mine, who's quite the violin/fiddle player was over a few weeks ago and has been considering starting to play guitar for a while. When he saw the instruments I have in progress and completed he became immediately interested in having me build one (the price being the cost of materials probably contributed as well). After some discussions and looking at a bunch of guitars, he decided on a sort of hybrid hollowbody/electric with an arched top on it. Like my friend and the Jazzmaster, he'd like to be involved in the building. The specs we settled one are:
25" scale, 22 frets
Hollow sapele body with carved curly maple top
Curly maple neck with ebony fretboard
Ebony bridge and tailpiece
Ebony/maple/dyed maple veneers on both sides of the headstock
Golden Age PAF pickups with nickel covers
Amber burst finish top and neck, blackburst on the sapele back
White binding on neck, headstock and body
So far we've been working for 3 days and here's what we've done:
Bought some maple and sapele:
Cut out the body halves on the bandsaw and glued them up:
Routed the body to the template:
Hollowed out the body first using Forstner bits, my buddy was assigned the task of drill press operator:
Cleaned it up with the router:
Carved the top. I didn't get any shots of the router work, but we cut a series of ledges matching the desired contouring before moving on to gouges, rasps and a spokeshave:
The top is rough carved enough to start the inside of the carve:
The inside carving is being sped up quickly using a jig I built for the drill press. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of it, but I can get one and throw it up if anyone's interested. It's just a 1" x 1" pillar about 6" long with a felt pad mounted to the top. This is mounted to the drill press and the depth stop was set to get a 1/4" thick top, which should be plenty to make it easy enough to get to the final depth of about 3/16". Here's a progress shot of the top:
At first I was a little hesitant of getting too close to the edges where there was more curvature. I wasn't sure how well the jig would pull the body so that the outer surface would sit tangential to the felt pad. It turns out it worked very well and we were able to get most of the top drilled out with a 3/4" Forstner bit.