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.
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