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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 people only have access to a standard format laser printer (Letter or A4). For obvious reasons, these might seem inadequate for the task since most of the templates we need to make (such as for body outlines) tend to be far larger. One solution might be to have your plan printed at a copy house straight to the appropriate size such as ANSI C or A2 which makes things a lot easier, even if it's a more expensive option. Printing a larger design over several small sheets and manually tiling them can be done within minutes, and with a little careful planning can be equally as accurate. Applying the page(s) to your target sheet stock can present a problem; spray glue is expensive, ridiculously messy and a pain to apply paper onto. Once it sticks, it goes nowhere! Equally, water-based glues have their own difficulties with the paper rippling and distorting. Without a large press, the paper bubbles and adheres poorly. Worse, when shaping a paper-based template the edges "fluff up" and obscure the lines we're trying to shape to. An alternative is to print directly to the sheet stock, or more accurately transfer a print. By taking the glues and reliance on paper out of the question, we can produce templates that are more permanent and far less hassle to produce overall. Toner Transfer Method Laser printers work by heating a solid ink powder ("toner") on a drum, physically pressing and depositing the molten ink onto the media. The toner transfer method reverses that process by using heat to re-transfer the toner from the media to the target workpiece. Why am I using the terms "target workpiece" and "media"? Media in this case is normally printer paper. We're going to bend this a little and use something a little different in place of standard paper. Secondly, "target workpiece" is down to this method having its roots in a different technique; homebrew PCB production. In that, rather than transferring toner to a sheet of MDF, hardboard or plywood it is transferred to a plain copper PCB sheet as a "mask" before etching the circuit design. The overall concept is the same. We temporarily print our design onto paper and transfer it elsewhere using heat. You will need: Glossy junk mail (with pages that will go through your printer) Painter's tape Craft knife or blade Steel ruler Clothes iron For this demonstration, I'll be transferring a doublecut bass design to a sheet of 5mm MDF. A little preparation work on your drawing is necessary. Firstly, I made a mirrored copy of the items I wanted to appear in my plan and increased the line weights to 0,5mm (~0.02in). Secondly, I created a custom printer setting which prints darker and turned "toner saving" off. Having heavier line weights and darker printing loads more toner to the print media, making it easier to transfer toner back off and to the target. Step 1 - Mark up your stock sheet I'll be tiling four sheets of paper in a 2x2 grid. To give myself reference, I drew a line across the centre of the MDF sheet and added a small mark midway across. All of the sheets will align along their longest side to this line, with the corners coinciding at this midway mark. Step 2 - Prepare for printing I chose a mail order catalogue which is slightly smaller than A4 for the print media. The paper is semi-glossy and fairly thin. Not all paper works the same for this process, so run through these steps to get familiar with the process and try a few test pieces first. The binding is a typical hot-melt glue type, so I ran a hot clothes iron along the spine and pulled off the covers. Whilst still warm the pages were easily parted into smaller sections. The residual bits of hot glue should be trimmed off otherwise they'll happily end up on your printer drum. This is NOT a good thing. I emptied the paper drawer and reset the guides to match the paper. On my computer I added a custom paper size corresponding to the physical dimensions of this paper which were 208mm x 279mm, or a little narrower than Letter. This gives you an idea of the print settings for my chosen CAD package, TurboCAD. The "real" paper size consists of 2 rows and 2 columns (set in "Layout") of my custom-defined paper size. The virtual drawing sheet size is a breakdown of the CAD plan automatically sized to the printable area. Most importantly the print is set to 1:1 scaling along with adding in the chosen alignment marks. Step 3 - Printing Send your print job to the printer and manually load one sheet at a time. Doing this reduces the chances of the paper pickup taking several sheets at once and causing a jam. Load the paper so that the print will end up on the side that is the clearest - you need to be able to see the print to trim up to it! Check that the print hasn't wrinkled or smudged, and that the alignment marks are visible. Check that the pages line up with each other without gaps/overprint and that the dimensions of the drawing are in fact 1:1 in both width and height. Step 4 - Transferral Firstly - using your steel ruler and a blade, trim the excess margins from the pages where they mate so that they butt up to each other perfectly. Align the edge and corner of the first page to the reference marks on your sheet and tape the four corners that the page lays as flatly as possible (unlike my example *cough*). (Finnish women don't look like this) Starting from the inside corner, place the iron on its highest temperature and leave it to sit for 10-15 seconds. After this, pick up the iron and place it further away from the corner with no overlap. Repeat this for the entire page. (actually, they're not screaming under the heat so at least they seem resilient like Finnish women anyway) What we're doing here is partially bonding the page to the sheet. The toner re-melts and sticks to both the iron and the paper. The page can be left a few minutes to cool, and then we can iron the page with some pressure! The glue on your painter's tape will likely melt during the ironing; making the pages prone to sliding and smudging the toner, so refine your technique with this in mind and don't drag the paper with the iron. Making sure than the sole of the iron is clean helps a great deal. After thoroughly pressing the paper down, the toner should ideally have "left" the paper and stuck preferentially to the target, hence why we used a glossier paper than standard printer paper; the bond between the ink and the glossier surface is weaker. Carefully peel the page backwards from the far corner, examining the transfer as you do so. If areas are missing, carefully re-apply the page and re-iron, taking care not to add in any misalignment as you do so. Ideally, you should end up with something like this: Transfers are rarely perfect due to a number of reasons; the cleanliness/smoothness of the target surface, and the paper used makes a difference. Your clothes iron needs to be as hot as it can manage. Again, find out what works best. All that remains is to repeat this process for all four sheets, aligning each one with the reference marks as carefully as you are able. The toner transfer method is not perfect by any means, and is subject to tolerance. Knowing how and when tolerances creep in is essential in keeping this technique accurate enough for its purpose. The lower-left sheet has a slight misalignment; things like this need to be borne in mind if any of the items you have transferred contain critical measurements. Manually check and re-check every precise dimension and marking for suitability, and re-draw them manually if needs be. Tips Include a long scale ruler on your drawing that occupies one sheet. This can help spot any dimensioning inaccuracies. Add a regularly-sized grid. 5cm or 2" gridlines expose any misalignment or distortion. Transfer the edges of guidelines to the other side. Place your sheet against a window and mark the locations of guidelines as they transition from one sheet to the next; this helps ensure that all sheets are aligned with each other since the print is on the underside. TURN OFF THE STEAM! Clean the (cold) iron sole with acetone before and after using the iron! Most importantly, you want the transfer work to go well. Secondly, you don't want to accidentally end up with melted toner or tape glue on your dress or your wife's dress shirt. Learn which things to include and not to include on your printed plan. Comprehensive is nice, but simple is clearer. This technique is also a great way of transferring photos or designs to a workpiece. Everybody knows that a gift of a cat photo on a 2x4 serves as adequate forgiveness for returning the iron with sticky toner on the sole.

This text is the literary accompaniment to this YouTube instructional video: The first thing to keep in mind when building a template is to ensure that you have a full-scale drawing/blueprint of the guitar you wish to make templates for. There’s nothing worse than making a template only to find out it won’t work for you… or even worse, building the guitar from that template! So check, and recheck all your measurements and drawings to make sure you’ve got it all right. To build a quality template you’re going to need a couple of tools and a short list of materials. For the actual templates you’re going to need 1/8” thick hardboard, and ¾” (1/2” also works, but I prefer the thicker variety) MDF. Both of these materials are relatively cheap at the home depot or Lowes. As for the tools, you’ll of course need a pencil, ruler, marker, oscillating spindle sander or drum sander chucked into your drill press, some sort of saw; be it a jigsaw, coping saw, or the best, a scroll or bandsaw, a palm sander (square pad will work better for this than an RO sander), and lastly a router preferably with a table. The first step is to get the sharp of your body from your drawings onto the 1/8” hardboard. This is easily done by cutting the shape out from your blueprints (always make sure you have a non-cut up copy! You can copy things this large at a FedEx Kinkos) and then trace it onto the hardboard with your pencil, centering it along the center line you have already drawn with your ruler (center lines are KEY to guitar building!). Since the hardboard is a relatively dark material the pencil may be hard to see well enough to follow, so now go over this line with your thin tipped marker in a nice easy to see black line. You may now roughly cut out the shape using the saw device of your choice. Try and keep as close to the black line as you can without going into it (leaving about 1/16” off the line should be close enough for this step), because you can always later remove material you failed to cut away, but you can never add back material that you took off inside the line. You should now have a rough shape for your body, but that obviously still needs a little work. The next step will be to perfect the shape with sanders. Start the sanding process by using the OS Sander or chucked drum sander to work at creating a continuous, perfectly flowing curve on all of the concave sections of the template. It’s generally a good idea to keep the template moving along the curve instead of sitting and sanding it in one place, which will cause a depression. The only time you should sand an area without moving is if you have a large lump that needs some serious bringing down to level with the curve. This constant motion while sanding will help to perfect the curve and make it smooth and continuous. The best way to find out if you’ve accomplished this is by holding the template up to, and covering the sun, or a light, so that the light comes in around the template and gives you a starkly contrasted profile which allows you to see the state that the edges of the template are in much better than simply looking at them normally. Keep in mind, even the slightest imperfections on your 1/8” template will come out to be large noticeable ones when they are compounded by the 1.5”-1.75” thickness of the guitar’s body the template will make. Once you are done and happy with the concave sections of the template, it’s now time to focus on the convex sections. For this we will use the palm sander. The reason for this is because it has a flat bottom surface, meaning it will sand off all high spots, but since it’s flat and the surface is convex, it won’t further sand lower and of the low spots, ie: you’ll end up with some nice uniformity. Using the same process of checking your progress with light profiles, sand the convex sections until they too flow perfectly and you are happy with them. Now take your 1/8” hardboard template and trace that onto a piece of ¾” MDF with a centerline. Then once again roughly saw out the outline, this time you don’t have to be nearly as accurate. Then, using double sided tape, nails, whatever you have around, secure the 1/8” template onto the rough cut ¾” MDF one. We will now use a bearing guided bit with your router table to copy the exact shape of the 1/8” template to the ¾” one. Keep in mind this may take several passes because ¾” is quite a bit of material, even though MDF cuts like butter on a router. Now you might ask, “Why did I got through the whole process of hand creating a template in the 1/8” material, just to end up using it only to create a ¾” one!?” The answer is simple. 1/8” thick material is much easier to shape by hand and with simple tools. Also, since the material is thin, even if you sand the edge at an angle, or some other mistake, since the bearing on the router is thicker than the material, it will follow only the high parts, in essence, negating these angled sides/mistakes. Whereas, if you had made the same mistake on a hand done ¾” template, since it’s thicker, and mistake over its thickness will have a greater impact than that of the 1/8” material. This is easily explained with right triangles. Lets say you accidentally sand the edge at a 3-degree angle. 3 degrees over 1/8” is really a negligible difference on the side of the triangle opposite the angle. However, the same mistake done over a triangle of base length ¾” will result in a much larger error, one that could easily be large enough, when transferred to your guitar body, to make a flat spot, or an imperfect curve, or any number of visual unpleasant features. As for the reason for needing a ¾” template at all and not just using the 1/8” one to route the body; since the body will be some 1.5”-1.75” thick you’ll have to route in several passes and thus the bearing will go up in height each pass, and therefore you’ll need a thicker template to accommodate for this so that the bearing will always have a surface of the template to follow. Follow the same above steps to create your template for the headstock shape. The final template that you’ll need to create is the template for your neck and fretboard. The good thing about this template is that if you build the template for the neck, you can also use it for the fretboard. Simply find the width of the neck at the nut and at any point further down the neck, say something like the 12th or the 24th fret for convenience, and then take a perfectly straight piece of wood (often the edges of the MDF when you buy it are straight enough, so cut off a strip or two) and using strong double sided tape, tape this straight piece along one edge of the taper you’ve drawn out between the nut and the point you chose further down the neck. Use this straight piece and a template bearing guided router bit to route along it, then repeat for the other side of the fretboard taper. Now you should have the perfect taper for your neck and fretboard. It’s now time to cut off the extra wood where the nut will be, and also down where the end of your neck tenon will be. If you want to route your neck pocket with a router, you should round off the ends of you template down where the tenon end is at the same radius as the bit you plan to route the neck pocket with for a nice tight fit. You can use this whole template to route the entire neck (in conjunction with the headstock template you’ve made) or to route just the fretboard by positioning the fretboard wood at the nut and centered. Keep in mind, the straight wood/bearing bit method can be used for a great number of things such as routing the perfect control cavity, or even more complicated routes like a neck pocket, which can be done by clamping the neck where you want it, and then taping straight pieces on either side and at the end of the tenon. Courtesy of Chris Verhoeven, edited for forum use by @Desopolis

First of all this will work using any spray paint method be it from a can, air brush or paint gun so don't worry about having to purchase expensive equipment. You will need: Trace out your guitar body onto reasonably-thick card as shown below then cut out your template. Place push pins around the template at least 1" from the sides for support. Placing your template on the guitar body use pennies, nickels or quarters (washers if you genuinely are a PoorBoy) taped in tubes as weights. The idea here is to hold the template down on the guitar body. Be sure that the template is aligned with the edge of the body all the way around. Now you can begin to paint! Remember that you need to keep an evenly spaced view of the body as you move around. Importantly, keep the nozzle of your spraying apparatus at least 18" or more away from the template. Too close and you could bend the horns or blow it away! Also, the closer you get with the nozzle, the sharper the edge of the spray will be as it hits the body. The distance makes the burst softer. Let it dry completely before removing the template. There you go! A beautiful burst every time with a nice fanned edge =o) With a little practice you can do multiple colors at different depths from the edge of the body. Ever wondered how to go from a shiny metallic, bright or dark burst edge to the middle and keep relatively the same hue of translucence color on your body? Here's a few tips which may help: Metallic looking edges are made by applying a silver burst around the body, then painting the entire body in a translucent color of choiceBright looking edges are made by applying a white or light-colored burst around the body, then painting the entire body in the translucent color of choiceMedium to dark edges are made by applying a medium to dark gray burst around the body, then painting the entire body in the translucent color of choice