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.