New solid body electric guitar

[roger wiegand]

I hope to make periodic posts through this build, the Day designations will, I expect refer to days of posts rather than day of build, perhaps like some people interpret biblical "days" of creation. Too many other projects happening at the same time! I built a bass with my son most of a decade ago, now he'd like a guitar. He's providing all the hardware, the wood bits are up to me.

Anyway, the first step is to lay up a blank for the neck. Bookmatched hard curly maple with plies of cherry, maple veneer, and a stripe of redheart. The redheart won't retain the bright color, but will still have contrast and look nice as it ages. I know I'm a glutton for punishment with carving and shaping the curly maple, but it looks so nice when it's done!

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It's going to be built to basic Strat dimensions and scale, with Strat style pickups. It is a through-neck design though, and the peghead will be angled, so definitely not a straight Strat copy. I've got a nice piece of cocobolo for the front and back that is thick enough to allow me to resaw it into two bookmatched sets, so both front and back will be bookmatched from the same piece of wood. Body shape, peghead shape, and inlay designs are still to be designed, that's probably the next order of business before I get too far ahead of myself!

[David Falkner]

That's going to look awesome, Roger! Anything built with Curly Maple, Cocobolo, Redheart, etc. has to look good. Looking forward to the next set of photos.

David

[Jim Becker]

Dang...that's an eye-popping start! This is going to be good....

[roger wiegand]

Some progress, but then things ground to a halt when the tensioner screw on my bandsaw broke . Things had been going along, but then utter failure in trying to resaw some veneers for the body lamination. Fortunately I was cutting some cherry from scrap boards rather than my piece of cocobolo! A replacement screw mechanism is on the way. It's coming from Georgia, my last package from there took over three weeks to arrive. I hope this goes better.

A body shape has been decided after tweaking things on paper for a while, and router templates cut out. The knot in the cocobolo board will end up in the front left panel of the guitar. I'm letting the body shape percolate for a while, this may not be the final iteration, but I'm pretty happy with the way it looks in general. I wasn't going for anything very radical. Now thinking about peghead shapes. On my last build I got the tuners uncomfortably close together, so want to avoid that. They were done in-line, I'm going to do this one with three on each side. Busy researching peghead angles to figure out what is enough but not too much. Of course I kind of need a working band saw to rough out the shape.

router templates laid up next to the neck blank
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Noodling on paper about body shape
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The piece of cocobolo that will be resawn to provide the front and back faces. Nice color in it.
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[roger wiegand]

Well the project ground to a halt almost as soon as it had started when my bandsaw broke for good. Turns out it had been failing for years with multiple problems. I had blithely assumed that I couldn't turn the tensioner any more because it was as tight as it would go. Wrong. After disastrously failing at resawing some veneer that it used to be able to do I noticed the blade had a wicked curve in it while cutting. That led me to look more closely at the tensioner which turned out to have a completely bunged up thread-- it wouldn't turn because there was marginal thread and it was jamming.

So, I ordered a new tensioner rod (one with a nice big handle on it from Highland Hdw.), after my last Georgia shipping experience which took 19 days I was pleased when it arrived today. Much more robust nut, well machined rod, and, as I said, a nice handwheel. Popped it on, fit perfectly, and cranked the tension up so that the blade barely deflected. Woo-hoo!

That's when I discovered my blade was dull as a hoe, having run off the wheel and into a support member in a previous chapter of this band saw resuscitation that involved replacing the upper wheel hinge, thanks to Creeker's who identified my problem. Fortunately I was practicing on a piece of cheap cherry at the time that I needed for part of the body lamination. OK, had a brand new "wood slicer" blade hanging on the wall, installed it, adjusted all the guides, and wow, the saw was running quieter and smoother than it has in many years. (Leading me to kick myself for putting up with it in lousy condition for so long.)

On to the main show, resawing the cocobolo for the back and front faces of the guitar! I almost couldn't believe my eyes after the first cut. I'd completely forgotten how colorful freshly cut cocobolo is! I know it won't last, but wow!

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These photos really don't do the intense yellows and purples in the wood justice.

With the bandsaw humming it really wasn't the white-knuckle experience I was dreading. The wood slicer worked as advertised and gave me perfect 7 mm thick slices that needed only a minimal passage through the drum sander to clean them up.

Tomorrow it will be on to beginning to laminate the body, laying out and making router templates for the wiring cavities, and perhaps rough shaping of the neck. I'm going to try to use the laster cutter to make the electronics access panel in the back in hopes of a close enough fit that I can make it look seamless. We'll see-- tell me if I'm heading for disaster with that!

We had been thinking about how to lay out the knobs and switches; looking at the re-sawn top we realized that we really have to consider the figure of the wood in deciding how to place them. I'm thinking a clear template is going to be useful for that.

[Prashun Patel]

Elmer Guitar makes a hand held fret press but honestly, I think it better to get their "Fret press caul with 5 inserts" and then use it in an HF 1 ton arbor press or even just chuck it in your drill press (for a one-off job). The hand press is awkward to use; you need a third hand. The drill or arbor presses generate more force more ergonomically which you will need for your chosen fretboard...

The problem is more with your ebony than your ss frets. Ebony does not compress easily so it requires a lot of force to press the frets in. What i did on my most recent build was file the corners of the fret slots and recut the slots by hand with a .023 kerf blade. You can create just a little bit of relief that allows the fret to go in without a ton (literally) of force. I CA glue my frets after the fact, but I theorized that it would be better to use PVA on the tang to help lubricate the insertion. It's also easier to clean up than CA.

Stainless will be harder to level. I would also glue on the fretboard to the neck, and re-radius the fretboard by hand until it's level and flat. As long as your slots are adequately deep, the frets will seat flat. After pressing, I use a brass mallet to seat them all completely, checking progress with a fret rocker. If done this way, I don't really have to do much fret reshaping.

[Jim Becker]

I have the Elmer press and inserts for my DP and plan on buying an inexpensive arbor press to modify and dedicate to the process if I continue to build guitars. Elmer is one of the few EBay vendors I buy stuff from. Good values and well...that was also my father's first name.

[roger wiegand]

Frets before or after gluing the fingerboard to the neck? I was taught and have always done it after, it would be easier to brace the fingerboard against downward pressure before. I was told that you could generate a back bow in the fingerboard doing it before that was difficult to contend with. I already have a saddle I made for the purpose.

I was also advised (by someone who works on very expensive instruments and has had to go back and refret a couple of times now on instruments he started working on 50+ years ago) never to glue frets in. He would file the tang down if the fretwire was too wide for the slot and add extra crimps to make it fatter if needed. Altering the instrument was a last resort.

Off to consult with Elmer. I've always hated hitting my new neck with a hammer.

[Jim Becker]

Frets before or after gluing the fingerboard to the neck?

'Depends upon the design. It's typical to fret after the fretboard is glued onto the neck for Fender design/influence necks. For Gibson and similar designs, especially if binding is involved, it's common to fret first and then glue the board on the neck. Many hand-makers will do the fretwork, regardless, before carving the back of the neck. We do use CNC for neck carving do the fretwork after carving and use radiused cauls to secure and hold the neck while the frets are pressed or hammered.

BTW, the Elmer press caul can also use the radius inserts from StewMac if the set that comes with the caul doesn't have the radius you want/need for a particular instrument.

[roger wiegand]

A quick update on progress-- The peghead inlay is now cut out and getting some final tweaking. I've laid it out on the peghead and marked it for cutting the recesses. I've always struggled about how to hold those squirrelly little pieces in place while I scribe them for inlaying, I think I may have finally found a winner. The little white dots you see around the edges of the abalone are freshly applied PVC-E glue, a flexible plastic glue. (I mounted one of those skinny tips Starbond provides with their CA to a syringe, making it easy to deposit 5 µl droplets. They seem to be adequate to hold the inlay in place and after I scribed they popped right off with a scalpel edge. After the overnight (and then some) soaks in acetone to get CA to break off this is a real pleasure. As I scribe I can just cut through the soft plastic. On to inlaying...

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[fred everett]

Looking good Roger

[David Falkner]

That's a really nice looking inlay, Roger!

David

[roger wiegand]

Disaster.

We'll see whether it is recoverable. I may have just made a nice wall hanging.

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Everything was good when it was time to glue the fingerboard on. The neck was made from wood that had been in the shop for years. It was jointed flat, rough shaped to near-final dimensions, allowed to sit for a good month. It was still flat. The fingerboard has been in the shop for two months. It' too was dead flat. I glued the flat fingerboard onto the flat neck (Tightbond II) and voila, a bow of a full quarter inch. Yikes. No way the truss rod can pull this anywhere close to flat. It's been three days.

Putting in the frets would bend it the right direction, but string tension will pull it back the other way.

I'm pretty much in despair right now, things were going so well. I'm thinking I need to pull the fingerboard off and see what happens to the bow. I simply clamped the fingerboard to the neck. I'm thinking if I can get it off I will use a glue that makes a rigid bond and re-glue with the neck and fingerboard clamped flat to a reference surface. I used every trick I know to make the neck as stable as possible, and prior to the glue-up everything was flat and stable.

Hubris, Atë, Nemesis. Homer had it spot on.

[Prashun Patel]

that is a real head scratcher; I would have thought your laminated neck would have been a cinch to keep straight. Dumb question alert: Your truss rod is at neutral, right?

[roger wiegand]

that is a real head scratcher; I would have thought your laminated neck would have been a cinch to keep straight. Dumb question alert: Your truss rod is at neutral, right?

Yes, that what I would have (and did) think) I've cranked on the truss rod and can move it a couple mm, not nearly enough to take that bow out. Of course I've always been really leery of turning a truss rod too hard, and don't have a good feel for what is normal. I'm using the same double-acting rod from StewMac as I have in my other instruments. I've never really had to adjust a truss rod in one of these maple laminated necks, they just lay flat. I'm wracking my brain about what I did differently in this case.