Best Order in Which to Glue up Guitar Slab Pieces?

[Steve H Graham]

I managed to create 6 face-jointed boards I want to combine into a bookmatched solid-body guitar. The plan is to stack them three high.

Question: what's the best order in which to glue them up? Seems to me I should glue together two three-board halves first. Then I would joint them down the middle and glue them together. This seems less likely to result in a catastrophe than making three flat bookmatched boards and then stacking them and gluing them.

[Steve H Graham]

I decided to make two three-board slabs to start. Man, is it hard gluing boards together! I had no idea. I have 10 clamps on each roughly 7 by 18 board, and I'm not even nearly sure it's enough. And glue went EVERYWHERE!

[Chris Fournier]

I hope that you clamped the glue up assembly onto a flat bench and used a heavy caul on the top of the glue up to distribute the clamping pressure otherwise you may well have a really wacky mess which isn't flat.

If you have glue everywhere then I'd bet that you have used way too much glue.

It's true true that glue ups can be tricky. If I'm in doubt about how exactly a glue up is going to progress I do a dry run and refine the process which usually helps eliminate some potential pitfalls when it comes to the real deal.

When I first started making solid body guitars I made a torsion box press and it worked very well. It paid for itself and then some. I am fortunate enough to have a vacuum press these days and it simplifies things quite a bit.

Good luck!

[Chip Lindley]

A solid-body guitar built like a layer cake may have issues! Especially if different species of wood are incorporated. Most Telecasters (with a natural finish) are bookmatched side-by-side. Two halves glued together. That is, unless you are trying for that "cutting board" look...

Here's a 2-piece body:
169487
And a 3-piece body:
169488

[Steve H Graham]

Well, the Titebond III bottle said to apply glue "heavily," so...

I don't think it's possible for me to buy thick lumber locally, so at the very least, I will need two layers per guitar. The stuff they sell at the only good lumber yard I know of is almost exactly the thickness of a Telecaster, so I'm sure it would end up too thin after being worked into a guitar shape.

[Chris Fournier]

Steve I would recommend looking a bit harder in your state for a lumber dealer who specializes in hardwood lumber used for furniture, millwork etc.

8/4 or 2" thinck rough lumber will get you your guitar especially if you're putting a figured maple face on it.

With careful wood selection this has been done forever and the guitars work out just fine.

I guess we both know how the glue manufacturer ensures quarterly sales projections now don't we? "Apply glue heavily..."

[Bryan Morgan]

Well, the Titebond III bottle said to apply glue "heavily," so...

I don't think it's possible for me to buy thick lumber locally, so at the very least, I will need two layers per guitar. The stuff they sell at the only good lumber yard I know of is almost exactly the thickness of a Telecaster, so I'm sure it would end up too thin after being worked into a guitar shape.

If you have a jointer and a planer, ask if you can buy the wood rough cut before they mill it. One of the lumber yards by me seems like they only have milled limber but if you ask they'll let you get the stuff from the back... usually in giant unwieldy stacks.

[Steve H Graham]

I can use 8/4 if I don't want a bookmatched guitar. Unfortunately, I was trying to do a bookmatched top and back.

[John Coloccia]

Don't take this with any disrespect, but I'm curious how many guitars you've built? The reason I ask is that you're kind of getting hung up on some pretty basic operations. They may not seem basic now, but after a few guitars, you'll be wondering what the big deal was.

The thing you really need to focus on for an electric is playability. Neck angle, fret work, cutting the nut, etc. The body wood will make relatively small differences compared to the pickups and setup of the guitar.

Why not try tossing together a pine tele as a prototype? If you want to stretch, do a walnut top. The normal order of things would be to glue up the main body and bookmatched tops first, and then laminate the top to the back. You make a clamping caul out of MDF or plywood so that you get good clamping pressure, and unless you're way ahead of the curve, you'll find that you don't have enough clamps. LOL. The top is oversized but you're careful to align the centerlines as best you can. Then trim the top to fit the back, or leave them both oversize and trim them both at the same time. I just find it easier to trip 1/4" of top than trimming 1 3/4" or thereabouts of top and back. That also allows me to perfectly shape the back and if I make a booboo, I'm making it on cheap wood as opposed to the expensive, pretty top wood.

Then you have to worry about the neck pocket, the pickups, the control cavity, finishing, setup, etc. When you get through all of that several times, making a guitar with a book matched front and back will seem like no big deal. You'll figure out that if you do that, you almost certainly will need to do binding around the front and back or it won't look right at all. Doing a contrasting top without binding looks okay, but a top, middle and back all made out of walnut without binding will look very strange from the side.

Just my opinion. You can do this very cheaply as you can easily reuse the neck and all the electronics/hardware as you perfect your process.

I don't know if this is helping or not, but I'll say again: building a guitar is an exercise in doing things in the correct order, and its one of those things that you either get good at because you've been mentored, or that you get good at from building lots of cheap guitars and making lots of stupid mistakes (like me). That's a perfectly fine way of learning, but don't do it with expensive wood.

[Russell Sansom]

Or you can make a 1/2 size model in the candidate woods to get the wood-specific experience.

BTW, For a large flat plane of wood, a brayer is the way to go for distributing glue. Easy to make one with a 1" diameter dowel. But I would constrain movement between the two planes with some tiny dowels or even thin metal pins that are removed later. A couple keyed slots in waste areas will work too. It's impossible to keep two large planes from sliding around on each other when gluing up like this.

[Steve H Graham]

Don't take this with any disrespect, but I'm curious how many guitars you've built?

No offense taken. I have no idea what I'm doing. This is my first guitar. I thought gluing six pieces of wood together would be easy, and I'm sure it would be for someone with actual skills, but it turned out to be a real challenge for me, as you can see.

The tip about clamping the back on last occurred to me after I tried it the hard way. But seriously, I never dreamed it would be difficult to apply glue and clamp flat pieces of wood together.

I should have made a cheap guitar first, as you suggest. I didn't want to blow a lot of money on electrical components and so on, just to slap on a piece of pine, but I should have realized I was under no obligation to FINISH the guitar. Just making the body would have taught me a lot, and then I could have pitched it in the trash and started on a real guitar.


its one of those things that you either get good at because you've been mentored, or that you get good at from building lots of cheap guitars and making lots of stupid mistakes (like me).

Kind of looks like I'm attending the same school you did. I don't care. I'm having fun, even with the mistakes. And now I have a garage full of nice walnut boards, in case I want to make something else.

I may run out and look for some cheaper hardwood wide enough and thick enough to let me make a guitar without all this aggravation.

Don't take this project more seriously than I do. It's been a blast so far.

[Steve H Graham]

Great ideas. I was already interested in making a small guitar, for the couch and other places where a real guitar doesn't fit. I don't know where to get a neck, though. They probably sell them somewhere online.


Or you can make a 1/2 size model in the candidate woods to get the wood-specific experience.

BTW, For a large flat plane of wood, a brayer is the way to go for distributing glue. Easy to make one with a 1" diameter dowel. But I would constrain movement between the two planes with some tiny dowels or even thin metal pins that are removed later. A couple keyed slots in waste areas will work too. It's impossible to keep two large planes from sliding around on each other when gluing up like this.

[John Coloccia]

Let me give you a little trick that works on electrics. Once you have your slabs (top, middle, and back if you're doing a back), assemble the top and middle dry, with no glue. Get the centerlines lined up perfectly, and clamp. Nothing will move because it's dry. Drill through the pickup locations and insert dowels. When you do your glueup, simply glue it together, dowels and all. The dowels will keep the top from moving. On the back, drill into the control cavity.

Now of course, there is no control cavity on the back for a Tele. No problem. Get the back aligned and clamped, and drill more holes through the pickup locations, clearthrough the body and into the back, but NOT ALL THE WAY THROUGH. A forstner bit will make a nice flat bottom hole in the back. It doesn't need to be very deep at all. Even 1/32" is enough to simply keep things aligned. Again, insert dowels from the front and they will hold the back in alignment while you perform the glueup.

Ultimately, all of the dowels for the top, and the vast majority of the dowel for the back, will be routed away when you make the pockets for the pickups. If you were only doing a top, there would be no dowel at all after routing as you will make the dowel shorter than the depth of the pickup cavity.

Similarly, when you're gluing on your fret board, drill some small holes through the fret slot, get the fretboard aligned perfectly, and then drive some brads into the fingerboard and neck. Remove the fingerboard, apply glue, align the brads back into the holes, clamp and done.

God luck :)

[Chris Fournier]

8/4 is plenty for a solid body Tele, I've never used any heavier cut of lumber. There are great books out there that will guide you through the electric guitar building process, they're cheap and an easy read. The book will pay for itself in the materials cost that you save.

If you want to save yourself a lot of aggravation and make a better instrument consider edge laminating up the thick back prtion of the body, then routing all of the internal passages before you laminate the figured top onto the back. The bonus is that you can route in resonant chambers and lighten the guitar if your choose. You will also be able to route much larger passages for wiring etc. Win win.

You could make a couch guitar but just because you shrink the body size by 50% doesn't mean that you can shrink the scale length by 50%! Take a look at the Martin "travel" guitar. Standard scale length but the headstock design and bridge position make up the bulk of the real estate savings.

[Steve H Graham]

You can definitely shrink the scale length. I have a Tacoma Papoose which is tuned higher than a full-size guitar. It's a horrible instrument, but that's a sad story for another day. If it weren't such a bad guitar, it would be great for portable music.

The idea about doing the routing before gluing the top on is great.

I think a chambered instrument would be interesting. Eastman is making some fantastic hollow archtops in China; my luthier has one he loves. But I would like to start out with a solid guitar.

The Japanese make semi-hollow guitars by routing out the rims instead of bending them. I believe the Gibson ES346 is made that way. They seem pretty excited about it. I would have thought bent rims would be stronger and more rigid, but apparently the guitars are superior to the old-fashioned kind.

I have some great info on building Telecasters. A guy named Ron Kirn sells templates and very good instructional materials. They don't cover bookmatched instruments, and that's my problem.

Again, just to be clear, you can't make a bookmatched instrument 1 7/8" thick from 8/4 lumber without doing several layers, and to accomplish it with two layers, you would have to be so good you only lost 1/16" from each layer while making the body. The bandsaw and jointer would kill that much wood all by themselves.