Buddy's Building a Guitar...

BuddytheReow

BuddytheReow

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Well, sorta. I am going to build a guitar body. From scratch. Never done this before, so I figured I would document my journey here for anyone who's interested or would like to comment/give pointers.

A little introduction:

My first step into DIY was putting together a kit guitar about, oh, 5 years ago. That taught me a LOT about sanding, finishing, soldering, fretwork, etc. Of course, many mistakes were made along the process, but once complete I fell in love with working with my hands. Anyways, the kit build was functional, but the way the factory routed out the tremolo cavity made it really not playable due to horrible intonation. I mean, we're talking about a half step off once you got up to the highest fret! So, this turned into my chug machine for a while.

Fast forward to today and I've discovered a passion for woodworking and I think the time has come for me to try this out. Once I put the kit guitar together years ago it was always a pipedream to make a guitar 100% from scratch, or at least the wooden pieces: the body and the neck/fretboard.

What I'm going to do:

I'm going to take the finished neck from my kit build and make a guitar body out of a single 2x4. The 2x4 has been sitting in my garage for about a year, so I'm not worried about it warping. Any woodworker should know (either by trial and error or have been told) that construction grade lumber is incredibly moist when it's sitting on the shelf at your local home center and needs a significant amount of time to dry out. Otherwise you'll have lots of problems once the project is done for finer woodworking. The shape will be my own design, but of course I'll be inspired by what's currently out there. The power tools I will use/have are a table saw, miter saw, jigsaw, orbital sander, router, and hand drill. Some hardware I will cannibalize from the kit build, but not all.

I took the plunge over the weekend, but here was my starting point. My kit build and a single 2x4.

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Alright. First thing's first. Let's get a body blank going.

I took the 2x4 and cut it down into 18" length strips. There was a massive knot toward the end of the board, but it has been removed. I've got 5 pieces: 4 for the body blank and 1 for practicing my routing skills before committing. Some advice I had heard was to lay the boards so the end grain goes opposite of each other for stability purposes. Construction lumber also comes with rounded corners, so I'll need to rip those off on my saw before gluing them together.

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Glued it up in stages (i've only got a few clamps and a vice). She's a heavy girl! After I took this pic I sanded the faces down to 220 grit. The blank is ready to go! I'm going to fill in the gaps with wood filler and prime/paint it once the weather warms up again in the spring.

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Alright. Now the design phase. Like I said in my original post I took the plunge over the weekend and now catching up on writing down my experience here.

I'm not going to dive right in on the body, but rather make a template out of plywood and use my router to keep things smooth and square. Just google 'guitar templates' and you'll see what I mean.

The original idea I came across was a Danelectro Double Cutaway '59 body simply because it was different. Here's a pic from a blueprint I found online.

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But....

I don't think it's going to work with a 24 fret neck to be able to access those high frets. So, I started playing around with the horns a little bit. By the end of the day Saturday I was really trying to make this design work as is, but I put it away for the evening. Sometimes you just gotta step away and not force it. This is a more long term project for me and I don't want to rush it.

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Here's my final design before committing the outline to a sharpie, then a jigsaw. I took this pic right before my wife told me to go for a walk with her and confirm this is a "point of no return". Step away and don't force it. She's smart like that ;)

Not an exact measurement, but I also traced where the neck will sit. It may slide around a bit when laying it out, but there is some wiggle room. Center lines are extremely important in making a body and the pic doesn't capture it very well.


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Half an hour with a jigsaw and orbital sander for the outside curves, I switched to good old 120 grit sandpaper and elbow grease for about another hour. She's not finished since it got too cold sitting on my front steps 🥶. This won't be perfectly square, but I will try my best by hand. I need to do some finishing touches. You can see some sharpie on the outside and that's ok. It's just a guide for me to tell where to stop taking off wood. The sharpie will be more important on the actual body once I trace this on there and cut it out.

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Woo! You gonna be doing the neck and fretwork too?

I've been nursing an itch recently to make a super heavy-metal explorer-shaped electric Ukulele. Will follow.
 
Anybody wanna take a guess what the new weight will be? I've got some flush trim router bits coming from Amazon today, so this probably where this project will stand until the weekend at a minimum. The template needs a bit more sanding. I need to play around with the router and make some templates for other shapes. Perhaps a pedal out of a chunk of 2x4? We'll see.

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BuddytheReow said:
Darn. I was hoping nobody caught that... I think it will be ok structurally. The other side got a little more chipped out in the saw. Like I said, I'm going to use wood filler and paint it.
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I only see it because of the grain in the lower left. Which may not even be seen depending on how you do the controls, if you go non-opaque finish.

It's like you knew what you are doing or something.
 
This is a cool build. I love using inexpensive materials in upscale ways. A lot of the work I have done is in found or building grade materials.

At some point either early telecasters or esquires were made with pine bodies. I believe there are a few current fender production models as well.
 
This is really good so far. I really like your body design. Are you going to do a custom headstock too or go with whatever comes on the neck?

I always wanted to make a sort of angled/offset strat design. I used the JCF Online guitar builder years ago to make a picture of a Jackson style super strat then used photoshop to flatten and angle the butt end of the guitar so it was tilted. I thought it was pretty cool then I realized I had basically designed a Peavey Vandenberg. :ROFLMAO:
 
cdwillis said:
Are you going to do a custom headstock too or go with whatever comes on the neck?
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The neck is going on as is. See post #6 for the neck with the body. That neck is 100% finished. I should probably take better pics, but there will be plenty of time as this project comes along.
 
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Progress made, but not much. I had this long holiday weekend (4 days for me) and only got about 45 min to an hour to work on this. That being said...

Template finished sanding and transferred to the body via marker. The template will be my ultimate "guide" for this and the purpose of these next few steps are just to remove all the unwanted wood.

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Relief cuts made via jigsaw. This is going to be slow going since my saw barely makes it through the other side.

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I know it looks a mess, but I'm REALLY hoping using a router with the template will clean up the edges nicely. I'll need to pick up some double sided tape and just go for it.

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jwin615 said:
Is that pressure treated lumber? Looks really green in the first photos...
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It may have been. A lot of the green went away once I took out the orbital sander. Like I said, if this project goes south I won't be that upset over it (or at least from a materials perspective).
 
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