Neck, Pick Guard and More Body Work

Once the body was smooth and shaped to my liking I felt the next thing was attaching the neck to make it look like a guitar (just to make me feel better that it looked like a guitar) and also as a reference for where the rest of the guitar would fit into place.  Fortunately, the old neck still looked bright where it was connected to the body so I was able to use these bright spots as a reference.  I penciled in the lines to route out a cavity for the neck.  I took 5 passes to get the cavity to the proper depth for the neck, but with each pass (I didn't know at the time I was doing it) I was making the hole a little bigger.  I thought the bit I was using would basically follow the hole I cut out on the first pass, but it was also biting a little deeper into the sides with each pass.  After the cavity was finished, I determined where the holes needed to be to use the existing holes in the neck to attach it to the body.  I drilled the holes and attached the neck to the body using the old screws from the broken guitar.  To my surprise, it did actually look somewhat like a guitar!

With the neck on I decided I needed to work on the piece that was going to hold all the guts inside the guitar and also hide the large hole I was going to have to make in the body.  I wanted something that would contrast with the grain and texture and color of the oak, so I decided on a piece of poplar with some mineral stain in it.  For those that don't know much about wood, poplar is a relatively soft, light wood.  It's easy to work with, doesn't have much grain to it, and it gets some pretty electric colors across the face of the board sometimes known as mineral streaks.  The colors on the boards can range from blue, purple, green, pink, to almost black and it changes and stops and some boards look like they've been tie-dyed.  I took my piece of poplar and ran it through the electric planer as low as it would go.  I got it to about 1/8" or slightly less.  Before I cut it out on the band saw, I experimented with a couple different shapes for the pick guard but ended up sticking with the basic original shape from the original guitar.  It finally came down to deciding this guitar was mostly practice and learning and once I built one, then I could "break the mold" and start creating more unique patterns.

With the pick guard cut out, I got to work laying out where the pickups, knobs and lever would go on the guard.  Again, I decided to leave everything in it's original location, not just for continuity, but it also saved me from having to rewire the pieces, which for the most part I left in one big electronic clump until it was reused.  I dressed up the edge of the guard with my dremel tool, rounding it slightly to keep the edges from being sharp.  I penciled in all the holes that I needed to make in the pick guard and clamped it to the body to have something underneath to support the thin piece of wood as I routed it out.  Once I knew where the pick guard was going and it was clamped in place, I removed the neck, so it wouldn't interfere with the router and to make maneuvering the body a little easier.  On my first try, I actually broke the pick guard routing out one of the pickup holes too close to the edge of the piece, so it was back to the band saw.  Thankfully, I had planed a large enough piece for two pick guards.  The second time around, I also cut out the top pickup hole that was against the outer edge of the guard so I didn't have to route so close to the edge.  With the new piece cut out, I repenciled my lines, reclamped onto the body and routed everything out.  I tried to make each hole just a little small, so I could go back with my dremel tool and open each hole up a little to make a snug fit for the pickups.

Back Story and the Body Shape

Alright, first the back story. I've been working around wood for over 15 years.  I've been grading lumber for over 14 years.  The longer you do it, the more you notice the wood with the unique characteristics that you don't see every day.  Sometimes you see something that you've never seen before, even after all those years, so you have to set it off to the side and try and figure out something to do with it.

That is what brought me to creating my first electric guitar.  I was grading lumber one day and saw some nice wide pieces of curly quarter sawn red oak.  I'd seen quarter sawn oak before and I'd seen curly oak before but both together on such nice wide clear pieces of lumber was interesting.  I cut two feet off the  two boards I saw at the time and set them aside.  I stared at them over the next few months and had finally decided to use them for a coffee table as two center inserts around some other oak.  Thankfully, before I got started, my mind changed and I just kind of saw the guitar body sitting in the wood.  So I took the two pieces and glued them together.  A friend of mine gave me his sons old busted electric guitar so I gutted it to use the old body as a template and the rest of the pieces to rebuild a new guitar around this beautiful oak.

The entire process was actually pretty fun for me.  I hadn't used my router in a good long time and got plenty of chances to practice with it.  I traced the old body onto the oak and cut out the shape on a band saw.  I used some little drum sanding bits in my drill to smooth around the edges.  I used a belt sander to knock down the back of the body where it sits against your stomach and the front corner where your arm runs back and forth while strumming the guitar.  Then I was stuck.  I couldn't figure out how the guitar manufacturer rounds the edge of the body of the guitar.  If it was flat it would be as simple as throwing a roundover bit in the router and a quick pass around the edge, but now that there was a depression on each side, the router would miss this part if I kept it flat on the top, or bite into the side and change the angle of the rounding if I let the router drop into the depression.  I asked a couple millwrights at work and they couldn't figure it out either so I decided to just use those drum sanding bits and try to round out the edge as best I could.  I'm hoping to find a better way with future guitars, since that is very time consuming and you just can't get a consistent edge.