Bandsawing

Now that I have all my body wood, bookmatched, and glued together, it's time to cut it out. Here are a few pictures of my progress.

Finshing of Bookmatching

I have finished bookmatching my walnut, and the maple body caps are nearly done. I will be band sawing out the bodies very soon. Once that's done, it's time for routing and carving. Below is a picture of what the walnut looks like after it has been glued, and thickness sanded.






I have been keeping at making prototype pick ups too. So far nothing extraordinary has come about, but I'm learning, and have few pick ups made, that have potential. Below are pictures of me winding a coil, and soldering a pick up together. The ability to solder such tiny wires takes quite a bit of practice, as you can see.

Pick up progress

I have a pair of humbuckers finished. I will be putting these into my friends guitar this weekend, for a trial run. Here are some pictures. I know, I need to get some of me actually winding. But it's kind of an involved process. One picture is of the pick ups potting. That is when you soak them in a combination of paraffin, and bees wax. This solidifies the wires inside. If one of the tiny wires inside is a little loose, the pick up can feedback.

Resaw!

Resawing wood is to take a piece of wood, and bookmatch it. You cut it, and open it like a book, to have a mirror image of figure on both sides of the joint. My boss set up his bandsaw with the resaw modification last night. The blade is much deeper than a normal bandsaw blade, but thin (0.025") so the kerf of the blade wastes as little wood as possible. I have a couple pictures of me cutting my walnut body cores, and maple body caps. In the second picture, you can see me holding up some of the maple, and the effect of bookmatching with the squigly lines created in the curly maple.

So now I have my pick up making underway, and my bodies started. A lot will be happening all at once. I'll try to make sure i keep things up to date here, but I am going to be doing many longs nights for a while.

Long awaited update.

I have hit a spot with my project that is taking a lot longer than expected. I was planning on gluing headplates to the back of my guitars pegheads. However, the ebony I chose, even though it is about 1/16" thick, is very hard to bend. There is a slight curv that i need to get this ebony to match, and it's taking forever for the wood to cooperate.

You can see how i made a clamping caul for pressingthe ebony to the back side of the peghead in this picture. It's followed up by Dottie distracting me.









Other good news is that I finally got a pick up winder. I have also ordered a Telecaster pickup kit, and will build them up by hand for practice. My project guitars will have hand made pick ups in them, so this is a for practice thing. The last pictures are of me assembling the pickups. I will post some pictures of me winding them, and installing them into my telecaster soon.

Un-related to Guitar Building

I live about 3 blocks from the 35W bridge collapse. Here are some pictures I took the day it happened, and then some more from the 10th Avenue bridge a few days ago.

Auto body filler.

I have reached the point where i am going to start carving out my necks. To make sure that I duplicate each neck exactly, I made some carving cauls. What I did was to cut out some plywood, a little over sized.






Once I had those cut out, I used some auto body filler to make a true template of my neck. I coated the inside of the caul, and pressed it onto various parts of my telecaster neck, that i taped up to prevent the filler from bonding to my neck. After allowing the filler to cure, I was able to pry it off, and have my perfect tracing of my tele neck.






The other thing I have been working on, is putting my inlays into my finger boards. This is very time consuming, but will be worth it when all is done.