About a week ago, I showed you the start of 2 different guitar bodies that I started working on, finally. The one body project is something I started last winter, but decided to wait until summer to continue on. I don't have a good setup in the basement, so my woodworking makes a big mess in the basement. The body from last winter is a 3 piece body, it has a solid back piece and 2 front half pieces. These are supposed to be glued together to make a laminated body with tiger stripe maple on top and plain maple on the back. The problem with this method is that everything has to fit together very well for the best glue adhesion. My problem with that is that I have to do all the fitting by hand, and that takes a lot of time and tedious work. I decided to set that one aside for now to work on the second body that I just started.
The second body was started recently from a solid piece of bird's eye maple that was about 7 inches wide and a touch more than one and a half inches thick. I'm using a piece that I cut from that board that is about 16 inches long. In my post from a week ago, I showed you the start of this project, the board, and the piece that I cut to use for the guitar body. I had started shaping the body, but I didn't get very far because I couldn't decide what kind of shape I wanted it to be. This body will be for a short scale 4 string electric guitar, much like a solid body baritone ukulele. Some people might call it a cigar box type of guitar.
After doing a bit of research and looking at different solid body guitar body styles, I finally decided on a general shape for the guitar. It won't really resemble any specific guitar because the body is too narrow to cut a lot of shape into it. I did manage to get a good start on the final shape for it today, now that I have a better idea of what I want.
Let's take a look at the progress so far. This was the start of the cutting a few days ago.
I rounded off the bottom of the body piece to get that end started, and I put a bit of a curve on one side. You can see my pencil marks for where the neck will go.
Here's the back of the body.
It was at about this point that I stopped for a couple of days to contemplate what kind of shape I wanted to add to the body. Today, I decided to work on it a bit more after having decided what general shape I want it to be. I had to get out the jig saw and make a few more cuts to the shape of the body.
After some cutting and sanding with both the angle grinder with a flap wheel, and the orbital sander, I sat the body on my outdoor workbench and set the neck on the body to get a feel of what it might look like when it's finished. This gives me a better idea of what else I might want to change on the body shape.
You can see how narrow the body is compared to the short scale neck.
I can see a couple of places for improvement of the shape of the curves to get a bit more of the shape that I'm going for now. Hopefully, I'll be working on that in the next few days. I also have to start working on cutting out the neck slot on the body, and the pickup slot, with the router. I haven't done this before, so I expect it to be a bit tricky. Hopefully, I won't mess it all up with the router. I'm going to have to buy a new bit for the router to make sure that it's as sharp as possible, that makes working in hardwood like maple a bit easier. Hopefully, I'll have more progress to report on in the next few days.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
