Next I got hold of some nice Ash for the body and some flame maple for the top. Jointed it, glued and planed it flat

Can't figure out how to add more than one photo to a post on mobile.. 

Then did a rough cut of the shape. With a circular saw ? 

Used a handheld router to tidy it up a bit and routed out the cavities and cable routes. Lots of mess in the garden. The wife is not a fan of me and my router

Glued the top on. I thought I was being very clever including some draw strings in the cavities to make it easy to pull the cables for the pickups and selector switch through. Lesson learned and more on that later! 

Routed the neck pocket and pickup cavities through the top. Router completely mangled my draw strings! ?

Should really have seen that coming 

Planed in the neck break angle and did a test fit of the neck. I should mention now that I thought doing a neck from scratch on my first build sounded a bit ambitious. I searched high and low to find a neck with a tenon that would fit the template I had (think it was a '58 Les Paul with a long skinny tenon. Ended up ordering a cheap thing from China which I came to regret a bit. Measurements and the fitting of the frets were good but the radius was a little skew. Ended up using it anyway 

Got bored very quickly with using chisels to do the top carve so busted out the belt sander, which was a lot quicker, although the neighbours must thought I was testing a jet engine!

Did some fine sanding and glued in the neck. 

I did more fine sanding and started working on the stain. Again, made a big mess of the garden and myself but I was pretty happy with the flame top.

You always hear luthiers go on about sanding and when you think you're finished sanding, sand some more. Lesson learned there - you can't really cover up shoddy sanding ? 

I went for an oil finish. I was initially happy with the result, but found that I really missed a high gloss finish. I fitted the hardware, did the wiring and got it working. I put a set of Seymour Duncan Alnico Pro II pups in with Cosmo black hardware. You can see a few spots where the carve is a little lumpy and the sanding doesn't look great.

I also found that it started looking grubby pretty quickly and I wasn't happy with the cheap Chinese fingerboard. The neck was also bound which didn't look quite right on the unbound body 

Sooo I sanded the finish off and yanked off the neck binding and fingerboard then ordered a lovely rosewood fingerboard from Guitar Making.

I went for a red top stain this time and left the body mostly natural, but with some of the old blue showing to make it a bit interesting 

Also went for a high gloss nitro finish, which I did with rattle cans. That was quite an education! Not 100% happy with the faux binding I tried to do but to be fair I'll probably never be happy 

Put some abalone dot inlays in then sanded the whole lot down to a nice even 12" radius

I should also mention that I took the opportunity to install a new truss rod when I put the fingerboard on. I figured it would be worthwhile as I wasn't sure of the quality of the cheapo Chinese one.

I tried installing the frets with a fretting hammer, but found that I was having to whack them so hard they were buckling. I tried with a fret press caul and c-clamps but ended up with frets sitting proud of the fingerboard

In the end I bought myself a 1t arbor press from ebay for fifty bucks with a tooling hole in the ram. I installed the fret press caul into that and it worked a treat. Perfectly set frets! Now I just need to find another use for an arbor press as its taking up a lot of space!

I levelled and polished the frets, carved a new nut, reinstalled the hardware and did a full set up. Pretty happy with the result overall. The new fingerboard looks and feels great and the colour matches my Riviera hanging next to it  ? 

I went for a red top stain this time and left the body mostly natural, but with some of the old blue showing to make it a bit interesting 

That looks pretty damn good - and impressive for a first build!

Also shows what you can do without a workshop, without all the tools that I typically reach for when I'm building a guitar.  The idea of rough-cutting the body shape with a circular saw is an interesting variation on the norm!

Understand the problem of no-space-in-the-garden for a workshop.  Perhaps you've got a spare room in the house instead??

?

@tv1010101 thank you very much! I thoroughly enjoyed the process and fully intend on doing it again.

I do have a shed in the garden but it's so full of stuff I can't really do any work in there

We're moving out of London soon though and I'll be getting my own space for tinkering!