Bizman62

It sure looks like wood and based on the big magnifying glass and the bunch of mini drill bits at least some of the carving has been done manually. Whether the rolls in the back are filament or cable is hard to tell but in any case their colours don't match with the woody brown. That's like @ScottR was making a 3D model of the @avengers63 Mucha theme on steroids.

Exactly! Your template already looks like it's a compilation of some of the weirdest ideas by Fender so why not take the idea one step further. "Inspired by... " tells that you've familiarized yourself with an existing design and found details that you'd like to improve to better suit your style and liking. That's even in the Good Book: "Test everything. Hold on to the good."

It looks like a Toronado but it's reversed and equipped with a Jaguar control plate and a ToM which most likely won't intonate at that angle!

Yes I know you weren't, But seeing how the ruler was off in the photo as it was taken rather to show how I did it and remembering I hadn't checked the line afterwards as the pocket was so tight, that's what made me worry.

Funny, for some reason the two last photos are pitch black. So I copied the address and tried with another browser and still black. Same result when saving the image to my pc. Is that due a limitation of Cloudfront? If so, you'd serve the PG community better by uploading the photos directly to the posts instead of linking. There's tons of lost photos in the early building threads. Guitar porn aside, but a tutorial isn't the same without explaining illustration.

Mike, your comment worried me some so I had to check. The neck seems to be in line with the centerline or at least close enough to fool my eyes.

Unfortunately that's how it is here as well, pine, spruce and birch, some alder and aspen for sauna furniture. Hakala is four hours from here which means a looong day or a night at a hotel which isn't cost effective especially if the end result is sufficient just to a couple of guitars. But there's other possibilities. A cabinetmaker might have something suitable or at least have contacts. Other fine carpenters as well. A parquet factory may use all sorts of hardwood and they may sell leftovers and b-class. Recently I've met the boss of a stair factory, there's been some talk about woods they have.

That was longer than my list. The Serbian: https://www.tonewood.rs/Tonewood/1/Tonewood.shtml Another Ebay source: https://www.ebay.com/usr/magic_wood?_trksid=p2047675.m3561.l2559 Hakalan Puutukku, no webshop: https://www.hakalanpuutukku.fi/summary-in-english

It somewhat depends on where you live. Here in Europe I know of two online sources in Spain, one in Germany, one in Serbia. But there's also local shops for special pieces of wood even here in Finland. There's several members here from the US who every now and then make me envious by telling how they've been allowed to scroll through a pile of full length boards to find one with the fanciest figuration imaginable and buying it for the price of regular lumber. Someone also told that their local lumber yard has a bargain bin for pieces that are too heavily figured to suit normal building projects! Shortly put, start at the nearest lumber yard!

Just a quarter inch top, a lighter base and potentially even chambered if needed? I once bought a pile from the outlet of a parquet factory and one piece had this nice figuration. When bookmatched there was the face of a cow but unfortunately the boards were too narrow to make a full top. But it worked quite nicely as wingtops on a neck-through, bent over an alder base. There's other quite stunning examples on this forum about using strips of other woods to make the top wide enough.

How coincidental! I was just thinking of you when scrolling through the list of forums, seeing your name and icon being the last poster in 'The Luthiery Business*. Lovely pieces of wood there and even more valuable as they're being repurposed.

I should have guessed that! Anyhow, guess I would have done the same. You never know what an extra piece of metal does to the sound and since we are only dealing with half of the strings the sound might become unbalanced with washers or tubes. Even if it weren't audible, you'd know that and keep a keen ear on any metallic 'Klang' on those strings. By the way, that pencil sharpener (using a socket was really clever!) type of thing won't make dowels that has the same grain direction. Dowels like that have an end grain face. For plugs with the same grain direction as the body or any other board you'd need a plug drill bit. They're not too expensive at Lidl but you can also use a piece of tube with the desired inner diameter. Filing some teeth will help but you don't need much cutting strength for a few plugs. Remember, you won't be cutting through the material, in your case a few millimetres will suffice.

Enough sanding! So I bit the bullet and after carefully and visibly marking the centerline I checked how the neck would align with it. Good enough. If it were perfect it wouldn't be my build! So Titebond to the cavity and the heel and some clamps. There's a length of 2x2 on the bass side to protect the edge of the body and pieces of plywood here and there. Apparently the wood had dried more during the summer so the neck pocket had widened a bit but a drop of water to swell it to fit and sideways clamping seemed to close the gap. After having a three hour coffee break it seemed safe to remove the clamps and continue. The heel didn't look too comfortable: ' So my favourite hand tool to the rescue! It didn't take too long to blend the neck into the body.

Your level of planning and preparing reminds me of a fellow builder, very admirable. Regarding the deeper ferrule holes, I'd recommend you to use something to even the depth to make sure that the string pull doesn't suck the center ferrules in and compress the wood. The fancy way would be to plug the bottoms of the holes with wood or even a lump of epoxy putty, the quick and dirty way is to use washers. In between falls cutting metal tube to a fitting length.

Yepp, that triangular boomerang thing starting from the end of the fretboard looks like a pickguard to me. Then again, the upper corner of a full width tenon would be visible with that.

You don't have wet bed sheets hanging around, do you? The only way I've found out to to get an uniform colour is to flood the wood with dye. And rather alcohol based than water based as it seems to work with the resins better. The abovementioned table tops are deep dark, similar to the area on the lower bout right after the glue joint.

You mean those for Jazzmasters and Mustangs?

At first I was going to say that it doesn't look sufficient until I figured out that the narrower square is part of the neck. That much should do. A couple of suggestions to your design, though: If you make the extension full width it would be both easier to make and provide more gluing surface. That's how PRS necks are made, they also carve the neck pickup into the heel. I was also thinking about a little notch to support the neck on the cutaway side, similar to Fenders etc. but the extension in the body makes that unnecessary.

What a lovely piece of wood!

Based on all the videos and stories I've seen about binding it seems that there still isn't a fool proof tool that gives perfect results in one go. There'll always be a ledge in the bottom, or the cavity is angled, or the depth isn't the same in all places, or you'll have to do some places by hand, or... Then again, I can't help but wonder how tedious it must have been before power routers!

Hoh, that looks funny without pickup cavities! Not bad by any means, it's pretty as can be. Just makes one want to take another look to believe their eyes. Do the wires in the cavity need to be that long? Or are they ready made to a given length and too difficult to reinstall the connectors without special tools?

That fretboard became classy after all, well done with the fixing! Cherry red? A dark chocolatey is yummy in my liking but there's so many other shades of it: https://icolorpalette.com/color/cherry-red Not too long ago my younger one moved to her own apartment, needing some furniture. So I took her old table top which was just a pine board and sanded all the crayon and water colour off, then flooded it with dark cherry red dye. She loved it. Then she found out that a TV table is needed. There was another pine top table with shorter legs originating from a sofa table, having served in the children's room and looking like it. So the orbital sander was needed again. Unfortunately the cherry red dye was running out but mixing crimson red with black and maybe drops of some other like amber gave a close enough result to match with the other one, they now stand side by side.

Like the soprano ukulele someone recently built for his mom, your eyes made tricks believing it's a guitar until it sat on his palm. The lining looks huge, though, so that gives some perspective. Speaking about lining, I just looked at some of the "Umpteen impressive woodworking ideas" where they cut slots both sides of a slat which makes it even more flexible. Today I talked about it with Veijo but came to the conclusion that it would not improve anything. While discussing the matter I also brought up the solid lining and the theory about it allowing the sound flow more fluidly inside the body. You should've seen his face...

Another Saturday well spent, with not much visible changes. I cut some more alder and then continued with the body. Sanded the edges a little paler and noticed that the nail holes have too sharp edges. So I took some saw dust and super glue to fill them. And I managed to accidentally delete the photos but you all know what a dust and glue filled hole looks like.

It never occurred to me that the hotpipe can be used horizontally! Every time I've seen an electric hotpipe it has been upright. Yet I've also seen torch heated tubes and they're always more or less horizontal.