Gogzs

Nah, no downplaying of my actual wood working experience. I do a lot of things with my hands in my free time, but mostly electronics/hardware related, and some mechanical stuff related to my old Volvo. But I did read a ton of build threads on this forum in the past 2 years, so I kinda knew what I was getting into... 

I bought the router, table saw, japanese saw and a bunch of clamps just for this project. I had a feeling I'd get addicted like you said, and you're right. I already have ideas for 2 more guitars, so the tools won't go to waste haha. 

Off to the local hardware store today before it gets shut down as a corona virus safety measure. I need some drill bits for wood, sanding paper and one of those files that has saw-like teeth or something like that. Cheers everyone, thanks for the nice welcome 

Hmm, seems like the first half of the post doesn't render well on chrome/edge (works in firefox). Hope some mod can help out with editing the post if I messed something up. Thanks. 

A bit of backstory. So, I played a little from 2006. to 2009. but then life got me. College, work, eventually moved abroad to run a startup and a bit over 3 years ago I moved back to my hometown, took a job as a software engineer, cut down my work hours as much as I could and enjoyed life a little more.

That's when I got back to playing a guitar and bought myself an Ibanez S521. I wanted a fixed bridge guitar that is comfy as fuck to play. The S521 was exactly that, but the sound was meh so I replaced the electronics and that's when I first bumped into this place. These days I've been on the edge of buying a new guitar, but everything I find that is thin bodied has compromises and costs 3k USD upwards. So I said fuck it, let's build something. 

As for woodworking, I have massive amounts of experience, I used a coping hand saw in woodshop class in elementary school, and woodglue once haha. As you can see, this will be one fun build :D

I started building this a month ago, and decided I should finally register here and post some progress. If it wasn't for this place, I wouldn't have even started something like this, so I'll share the fun with you folks :)

So first the wood:

I decided the neck would be wenge/panga panga + pear. 5 piece with thick panga panga stripes + thin pear stripes in the middle. Rosewood for the fretboard. I ordered 1 piece of panga panga, 1 piece of pear (but actually got two, dude said it's because of the imperfections) and 2 pieces of rosewood, since I was afraid I'd fuck up during slot cutting, and combined shipping would reduce costs if I fuck up. At this point I didn't order the body wood, also to reduce cost if I fuck this up, to pull the handbrake and spend the rest of the money on a nice guitar. 

And now the build steps. It's been a while since I glued two pieces of wood together, and I wasn't sure how the panga panga will hold onto the pear, I decided to laminate just the two of them together and see how that goes. 

After that went well I glued pear inbetween two panga panga stripes:

And eventually everything together:

So that part was rougly done, it was time to build a routing jig and flatten everything.

Turned out better than I expected, not much sanding was required to get the routing lines out, they were really minor for such a ghetto setup.

Now the first step I was afraid of, routing the trussrod slot. Turned to be a much easier task than I expected. 

At this point I just needed a small chizzle to square the end off. The truss rod sits in flush with the wood and has no room to wiggle. 

Next step I was really afraid of was cutting the freboard to size and cutting the slots. After a lot of measuring:

That turned out nice as well:

So now that I had the two scary precise parts figured out, I ordered the mahagany for the body and started cutting that one.

There you can see my beloved S521, and below it something that resembles more a cutting board than a guitar, but oh well :D
At this point, basically everyone that I know was like "This is as good as it'll get, put strings on and call it a day!!" haha. But screw them, I had a really detailed plan of how the guitar will look like, here's my super precise template:

Ok, maybe not the most precise, and not really a template. But you get the vibe. I'm going for a Stranberg like cutout at the bottom. I just love that about his guitars, I know it serves a purpose on his guitars, and it'll be pure aesthetics on mine, but the heart wants what the heart wants. 

This was a really rought cut with the jigsaw, but enough to be able to get in there with the router. 

The Strandberg like cutout is done, love how it looks, rest is still rough around the edges, but we're getting there.

I'm using the other piece of rosewood as a routing template, since I cut them both to the exact same dimensions. As for the headstock, I really wanted to go with the tear like cutout on it, but once I started routing that out, I changed my mind, this is how it'll stay most likely:

I put the tuners on with double sided tape just to see where they will roughly end up at. I'll print some tuner templates to position and mark the drilling holes more precise.

I also started trimming down the neck to thickness. And that's basically what I've done in the past 4 weeks. I work on it 3-4 hours all together during the work week, and 4-5 hours during saturdays. 

The plan is to keep the headstock this as long as possible so I can clamp it down to the table/use double sided sticky tape while routing. Next step is finalize the body shape, route out the cavity and pickup holes (will be a HH configuration), get the headstock to the right thickness, shape the neck, thin the body down to Ibanez S-series level thickness, and wrap it up in wipe-on poly (this is the plan for now, but if someone knows a better technique please say so, I wanna keep is simpleans as wood natural as possible). 

Cheers guys, thanks for all the tips (not in this thread, but on the forum in general). Hope you like this one :D