Hi everyone, thought I should showcase my first ever guitar build.
My Father in Law means a lot to me and for his birthday I decided to build him a guitar. He's usually a strat player so I wanted to go about building a Les Paul for someone who prefers strats!
He's also a joiner and I thought it would be good to make the body out of plywood. After gluing up the body blank I sunk a kilo of tabletop epoxy into it to stabilise it and help with any voids.
Despite that the full guitar comes in at just over 7lbs. It has a flame maple cap, maple neck, ebony fretboard and headstock vaneer. I also had some custom MOP cut to put his name in for the inlay. I redesigned the headstock to give a straight string pull and avoid any tuning issues. It has a pair of Tonerider Rocksong pickups in it, along with cts pots in modern wiring. The volume pots are push pull and it's wired for coil split.
The frets are Hosco Phosphor Bronze to keep with the black and gold theme and it has a bone nut. The last little custom touch is the fret markers. His favourite animal is the seahorse so I used mosaic pin stock from knife making for those. Gotoh tuners and a Schaler 3d6 bridge round off the build.
All in all this has taken nearly 2 years to pull together, just due to work commitments. It's a surprise and his birthday is this weekend so I can't wait to see his reaction.
There's an awful lot of little details that I can see that bug me, but for a first build I'm happy enough. Looking forward to getting started on the next one but my wife has told me I'm not allowed to do anymore woodwork until I build myself a workshop in the garden to keep the mess away from her!
Looking forward to your comments and feedback.
Hi Scotty, I think your father in law will be a very proud man when he gets that beautiful guitar. I love the body, can you tell us how you achieved the pattern? You’ve obviously put a lot of time and care into the build, it looks great. Better get that workshop sorted out so you can keep up the good work👍😃🎸
All the Best,
Brian🎸😃
Thanks very much, and of course I can.
The best way would be with a table saw but at the time I started this I didn't have access to one so I used a mitre saw.
I started with 12mm plywood at around 300mm wide. I cross cut that into strips with an angle of 60 degrees. I had to do a little bit of fiddling to find the right length. When it works you want a diamond where all the sides are the same length.
I glued 3 of those strips together to make long hexagonal bars. A table saw would have been more accurate but because I didn't have one some of the bars weren't exactly the right size. That's why there's some gaps in the pattern.
Once I had the long bars glued up I cut them down to 50mm, sat them on end and glued the long edges. I had a drawn out pattern on some baking paper so it wouldn't get glued to the table. I used some extra long rubber bands to provide pressure for the glue up.
It was a bit of a puzzle trying to find the best bits to fit into the gaps. I had to balance ones that were a little too wide with some that were a little too narrow.
After the blank was glued up with enough extra all the way round I made a wall of some plasticine and poured about a kilo of Epodex epoxy in multiple pours. Then it was just a case of surfacing the blank and carrying on as if it was a normal wooden body, if much more prone to chip out.
@scotty Wow that’s a tremendous amount of work but very worthwhile for the effect. I’ve seen something similar done on a smaller scale using pencils/coloured crayons. I can imagine that the prospect of chip out would have had you tearing your hair out when you were cutting the body profile. Thanks for the description 👍😃🎸
Brian
Yes there were a few hairy moments. In fact on one of the cuts the router took a bite and exploded a chunk up near the toggle switch. I had to take a scary sharp chisel and pare the blow out back to a solid ply. But the benefit was I could patch it invisibly as when I replaced the section all you could see were the layers just like before.
