Since I didn't already have enough projects to work on, I decided to start on another project. Actually this is a project that I've been thinking about since last year, but I didn't work on it last winter because I'm not set up for wood working in the basement. It's a lot easier to make the mess outside on a nice day. I've been so busy with the garden and the trailer that I had forgotten about the guitar body project that I had been planning.
I was planning on building a small body for my Music Man bass neck, the original body is made of ash and it's heavy. I was planning on laminating a piece of straight grain maple for the back, and a pair of pieces of curly maple for the face. The tricky part is getting the 2 face pieces to fit together nicely in the middle.
This is what I'm working with.
It's a matter of getting the edges of the two pieces sanded smooth and flat enough to fit together as tightly as I can get them. I have to just keep sanding them down by hand until they fit.
Once I get the center seam fitted, I can glue the body parts together and then cut the basic shape. After that there will be a lot of sanding to shape with various tools and by hand. Then I have to use the router to cut the slots for the neck and pickups. That should be interesting...
That's one guitar body project that I'm working on. Because I don't already have enough projects, I also started on a second guitar body. I've been thinking about building an electric baritone ukulele, basically a short scale guitar with 4 strings, but solid body electric. A couple of months ago I found a short scale Fender Stratocaster neck on ebay and bought it. These guitars are known as the "mini Strat", the scale is a good 2 inches shorter than a standard guitar neck. This neck is from their "Starcaster" line. This is actually a pretty nice neck.
I had several ideas for a body for the neck, from a cigar box style to something a lot fancier. I decided that I wanted a fairly small body so that it wouldn't be too heavy. I was looking around the basement for a nice piece of wood to use for the body, and I remembered I had a couple of pieces of well aged bird's eye maple. I wasn't sure how thick they were, but I dug one up that's about an inch and a half thick, thick enough to use. This will be a solid one piece body.
The board has some surface dips where the bark was, but I can work that into the contour of the back of the body.
This is more of the board.
I cut the board to 16 inches so I would have enough extra length for shaping the upper body curves. This will be the back side. I'll contour the body where that dip is.
This will be the front face of the body.
It should be really interesting using the router to inlet the body for the neck, pickup, and controls, bird's eye maple is known to be difficult to work with because of the crazy grain of the wood. You have to go slow with power tools like a router, and have really sharp bits. I'll buy a new carbide router bit for this project.
Once I have more progress on the projects, I'll do an update post for that.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
