It's been a little while since I've written an update for this project. That's mostly due to the fact that I had not gotten anything more done on it until now, too many other things going on. If you would like to read part 2 of this project, here's the link.
https://www.palnet.io/guitar/@amberyooper/building-a-guitar-body-part-2
The first thing I had to do to continue working on the guitar body was to go and buy a new router bit. I didn't have any straight cutter bits, so I bought a new carbide tipped 1/2 inch diameter straight cutter bit.
I chucked it up in my router and set the depth of cut for 1/2 inch. I set it to that depth because that's the same as the depth of cut for the neck pocket on my Fender Squire Stratocaster.
I don't have a router guide to use for cutting the neck pocket on the guitar body, so I had to cut it freehand. I had traced a line on the body around the heel of the neck that I'm using, and then followed that to the best of my ability, cutting a little bit at a time until I got it cut out. For the last bit of cutting, I set up a straight edge to try to get the edge cut as straight as possible. The neck pocket came out pretty good, considering. The brand new cutting bit was sharp enough to get a nice smooth cut with me pushing the router slowly through the wood.
I did a test fit of the neck into the pocket. As you can see, I still have to finish shaping the wood along the neck in the cutaway.
Another view of the test fit. It's not perfect, but I think it's really good for doing the routing by hand without a guide, just following a pencil line. I thought about trying to get the curved cut at the heel of the guitar neck a bit better, but I realized that I might just make it worse if I messed with it anymore.
Here's a look at the way the neck and body look together. I propped up the neck so it would sit in the pocket properly.
I grabbed the pickup that I've been thinking about using for this guitar and sat it on the body to see what it might look like in place. I'm only going to put 1 pickup on this guitar, that should be enough to do what I want it to do. This is a narrow dual coil humbucker with bar pole pieces.
I'm not going to cut the pocket for the pickup until I get the bridge installed on the body. Then I'll have a better idea of where to put the pickup. There's also a possibility that I might buy a standard size humbucker pickup for this guitar since there will be plenty of room for 1 big pickup. I originally bought the narrow humbucker to replace one of the single coil pickups in my Stratocaster, and I still want to do that.
I ordered the bridge pieces through ebay. I couldn't find a U.S. dealer that carried what I want, so I had to order them from an ebay seller from China. I don't expect to get them for a couple of weeks, so there's not much else I can do on this until then. I still have to finish shaping the wood around the single cutout, and I can make a pattern to drill the holes in the body for the neck screws, so that's probably what I'll do next on this project.
That's all I have for this update, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
