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Hello,
Here's just a little page to share with you the progress of the making of my guitar.


I think the idea of making my own DIY guitar came up somewhere during christmas 2008. Got several meetings with myself until I was in agreement about the specs :
  • solid body - mahogany
  • aluminium pickguard
  • pre-made maple neck with Basswood fingerboard
  • 2 filtertron-like humbuckers - if possible with a parallel/series coils switch each
  • a roller Tune-o-matic bridge
  • a bigsby-like tremolo

    • After buying all the hardware and making a few sketches, I cam up with this in May 2009 :


    Then someone very close to me said we should move house...

    So we moved house.

    ...

    Then, by January 2011, I'd had time to think, and time to play with Blender. So I tried to see how it would look like :


    I was ready to start...

    January - Body template and glueing the 2 halves :



    The first chips :

    Incredible how relaxing it can be to use a planer at the end of the working day. I think people who suffer from stress at work should have a thick wooden board and a planer in their office :o)




    I wanted to make a not-so-small guitar but all of a sudden, I wasn't sure about the size. Isn't it too big ? So I compared :


    That'll do it.

    so I copied the template with a router in order to have a thicker template with perfectly perpendicular edges :


    February - The neck pocket :

    I made a template for the neck pocket, with an angle of 2.23°.

    The edges of the template don't look good but it actually fits the neck quite well without noticeable play.

    And I took the router out again :

    Due to the diameter of the routing bit, I had ti finish the corners with a chisel. The good ol' way.

    And the result :



    March - Shaping the body :

    Since I had gone 1 mm to deep in the neck pocket, I removed 1 mm on the top of the body with first an electric planer then with the manual planer.

    I cut the rough shape with the electric jigsaw

    Errr, the shoe is just...a joke.

    Fine shaping with the router and the template (on the home-made routing table) :



    Rounding the back and the heel :



    Drilling the holes for the bridge and the Bigsby :




    Making the pickups cavity :




    April - Neck screws and binding :

    Locating accurately and drilling the holes for the neck screws :



    Routing the edge of the body for the binding :



    Glueing the binding :



    And the result :



    Still April - Pickguard and mahogany veneer on the headstock :

    Cutting the pickguard in a sheet of aluminium using shears first and then files :



    Drilling the holes


    Adn a preview :


    I noticed that the pickguard is too crowdy with 2 knobs, a jack and a switch so I decided to drill a hole and put the jack on the side.


    Then I noticed I had a piece of mahogany (left-over from cutting the body) that had just the size to cover the headstock. I thought a mahogany veneer would match the head to the body. So I gave it a try. I cut a 2 mm slice of mahogany, bent it using a vacuum cleaner heated with blowtorch (DIY man !). Tadaaaa :

    OK, it's a bit burnt but it's bent !

    Then glue and wait...



    Then it cut to shape, drill the holes, sand it. There you go :



    Since I was quite happy with the veneer, I decided I'd attempt an inlay made of aluminium.


    June, july august - the finishing :

    I started by applying 2 layers of terra cotta stain with a round of sanding in between. On the head and the body top :


    On purpose, I sanded un-evenly the second layer for a cloudy/rough effect. I'm happy about it, so far so good.

    After that, 2 layers of grain-filler all over the body and the neck, sanding in between :


    Here, the camera flash doesn't make justice to the stain (in real, it's not pink !) but it shows the effect with the stained top, the natural back and the binding between them.


    ANd at last, I started the varnish :

    2 layers, then sanding with 320 grade,
    2 layers, then sanding with 400 grade,
    2 layers, then sanding with 1000 grade.


    September - finishing et assembling :

    2 layers, then sanding with 1500 grade,
    2 layers, then sanding with 2000 grade and water.
    Then I did the polishing with car polish and a cloth.

    Then I assembled it all together. Phew! It looked good. No major problems. The neck is well aligned, the intonation and action are OK. The cavity is pretty small so it's hard to get all the electronics in there.
    After a short first test, some mods were needed :lower tone cap (15 nF), 1 nF treble bleed, adjustment of the nut and shorter springs for the pickups. And now it's fine.

    but...

    There's a little issue...
    The f***ing truss rod is blocked !!! I bought the neck on e-bay. And when I got it, I inspected it carefully. I just forgot to verify that the bloody truss worked well !
    Thanks god, it's convex, so with a 10-52 set of strings, it actually gets sligthly concave and I have an action of a little less than 1.5 mm on the 6th string at fret 7. It's not bad and fully playable.

    The result ? Here it is...





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