Day 6 - Inlay Work, Part 1

Oh thank God, I'm starting to make progress on my guitar again. It's been a rough month, and I've finally gotten back out in the garage-mahal to do some woodwork. You can figure that any sort of woodworking on crutches triples the effort. It's much more difficult to use a table saw balancing on one foot! Be careful lad - no more hospital time this year!!! So here's some more pics, hope you like 'em!

Here's the rosewood fretboard blank from earlier. This is resawn fresh off a slab of rosewood from Owl Hardwoods in Des Plaines, IL. This has been run over the jointer for a nice flat surface. More proper ways to do that would be to use a thickness planer or a Wagner Safe-T-Plane in the drill press. My method worked pretty well, it's consistently within .010" thickness across the whole board.

OK, I've got all the frets roughly marked out, a centerline drawn, and the taper laid out so I can rough everything in on the band saw.

Here's a tapered fretboard against my plywood mock up. Looks sexy, needs some inlays and frets!

I went for a 10" radius on this. I like a little bit tighter radius than a Gibson because I play a lot of chords and like a pretty hefty neck to wrap my fingers around. I cut the radius by using a 10" radius block from Stewart MacDonald. You can actually machine your own fairly easily if you have a router and a little creativity, but for $15 from Stewmac, it wasn't worth me jigging everything up. Sometimes it's worth it just to spring for the special tools.

To the untrained eye (or wife) this would appear to be a computer bench. However, if you take a hunk of scrap, rip a slot in it on the table saw and c-clamp it to your keyboard shelf, it's a very serviceable inlay design station.

I originally planned to do block inlays because those are pretty simple and easy to cut. When I ordered the figured mother of pearl from Stewmac, I had it in my mind it would come in like a 12"x12" sheet that I could easily cut blocks from. It actually comes in a bunch of random shaped blocks about 1in^2 each. I really couldn't cut block inlays out of these, so I thought what the hell, why not do some fancy inlay work. So it's going to be a couple of vines with figured white and green abalone. In the center, I'm going to do a real nice looking rose out of white and green. The headstock will be my logo in gold. As for the design of the vine, I've been free-handing that with a pencil on the pearl and cutting it out with a jeweler's saw. This has been a pretty efficient way to use the pearl. All the little leftover chunks become parts of the vine or thorns. Leaves are easy to cut, although I think I've snapped about 5 blades so far. At least they're cheap.

Over and out.

Rest In Peace, Ronnie!

Ronnie James Dio
July 10, 1942 - May 16, 2010

You will be missed. We await your return at the end of time when you ride forth from the Silver Mountain on a griffin carrying a sword of fire to slay the demon.

Day 5 - Headstock and Body Plans

It's finally starting to look like a guitar!!!

Now doesn't that look sexy? I love hand drawn stuff, there's nothing like it! I eventually bandsawed that whole piece out. You have to see if the balance is right and if it fits before going too crazy on expensive wood.

Here's the neck in its current form laying on top of the plan for full effect... Hot!!

Like that headstock shape! All Little Sahara design baby!

End shot, look at how beautiful that grain is!

There's a 15 degree angle on the headstock.

And from the bottom...

So at this point, (sometime early April), real life kicked in. The dog blew out his ACL and had to get surgery. There goes all my guitar funds! Shit. Then a month later, I had to get some major foot surgery, so there's another setback. Now, however, I'm getting to the point where I can start working on it again. I've started building a fret spacing jig (I'll show you how I did that soon) and have just ordered a bunch of stuff from Stewart Macdonald to do the fingerboard and finish off the neck. Once the neck's done, it will be much easier to slam out the body. Can't wait! Stay tuned for more!

Day 4 - Fingerboard Blank

Here's a setup to reduce one $16 hunk of rosewood into 3 or 4 usable fretboard blanks. That's a REALLY nice blade installed in the bandsaw there (Timberwolf if you're interested).

Also while I had everything set up I thought why not resaw the headstock top wood. So that's that nice flamed maple you saw earlier, about 1/8" thick.

Here I am gluing some new wings onto the new headstock blanks to make it wide enough.

Here's one of the trickiest bandsaw operations you can do. This is a resaw to make thinner stock. It's much easier with that wonderful blade. This saw could really use some new blade guides though. Someday I'll cough up $150 for the nice Carter guides.

Everything gluing up with the fretboard blank just laying there for effect. That block at the bottom is one of my favorite table saw tools - a 2x4 push block. Keep them fingers on the fretboard and out of the operating room!!

Day 3 - Regluing Headstock

Well, I wasn't in love with the scarf joint I made on day 2. it just didn't look as rock solid as I needed it, so I bandsawed it apart and started over.

Here's the old joint... Not quite what I wanted. Just a hair sloppier.

I had even gone so far as to glue wings on. Gonna need to do it over! Crap.

On the second attempt, I went through the effort of making a nice 15 degree cutting and gluing jig. This made all the difference.

You can never have too many clamps.

Here's a sneak peak at the top wood (flamed maple) and rosewood for the fingerboard. Beautiful!!!

Day 2 - Neck and Headstock Roughing

Here's a shot of the neck blank with a rough layout of the scarf joint drawn on it. In the background is the Make Your Own Electric Guitar fret spacing guide.

Another shot of the scarf joint layout.

I lopped off the bottom half of the neck blank. This will be flipped over, scarfed to the neck, and turned into the headstock.

here is the scarf joint on the neck side roughed out on the bandsaw.

Action shot of me roughing out the scarf joint on the headstock using the bandsaw.

Scarf joint surface - this gotta be smooth for the glue to hold! Right now it's pretty bumpy from the bandsaw.

So I run it over a jointer. That works pretty well. Just watch out for the grain. Because you're cutting across the grain, it will tend to tear out and piss you off on the backside.

Here's my cob-job glue up of the neck and headstock. This didn't work out so well... More on that later.

Day 1 - Building the Neck Blank

All great projects start out as a pile of Dad's fine hardwood. This all hails from beautiful Northern Michigan. That's a piece of maple, red oak, and walnut hailing from my homeland.

Essential construction materials - wood, plans, and a copy of Build Your Own Electric Guitar

Is that not the most kick-ass table saw you've ever seen? Ten bucks off craigslist!! I have a couple hundred in hardware to fix it up. I built that rip fence myself from some 2x2 box tubing I had laying around. It's copied off the Biesemeyer T-Square design and will rip to within 1/64" accuracy quite easily. I don't know how people make stuff without one of these. My tablesaw is king of the shop. I recently pulled the sheet metal wing off one side a built an extension router table out of 3/4" melamine ply. If you haven't figured it out yet, I hate buying things and love building them.

Here are all the ripped laminates - 1" maple, 1/8" walnut and 1/4" oak.

Honey, is that a bunch of wood glued together dripping Titebond all over the living room floor? No. Go back to watching Jersey Shore.

One laminated and planed neck blank, ready to become the most awesome guitar ever!!

Overview of the project

So ever since high school, I've wanted to build a guitar from scratch. In my mind, that's always been the most kick-ass instrument. Back then my dream axe was a sunburst Fender Strat with a rosewood fretboard, white pickups, chrome hardware. I always though those looked amazing and was in love with the idea of having 5 different pickup positions. So many different tone combinations! Well, I still love strats and a couple years ago threw together the Carvin bolt kit. I got the one with a humbucker in the bridge and a hard tail. I feel like tremolos kill a lot of sustain and I play like a tornado in a trailer park. If I really want to dive a note, I just grab the neck and bend the whole thing. The best part about that is it makes everyone cringe. C'mon guys, that's what the truss rod is for! I also have a Jackson Kelly that came out of my metal phase I went through in college. Course I had to put an EMG 81 and 85 in (these are for sale now, if anyone wants 'em, drop me a line - $75 for both). After college, I started drifting away from all the crazy effects and super hot amps and got back to basics. Tubes, baby, tubes. The sound coming out of the Jackson wasn't turning me on anymore, so last year that went through a complete rebuild. I stripped all the paint, bought a compressor and spray gun, put a real nice blue burst on it, and put Duncan EVO2 and Alnico Pro pickups in it. It's closer, but still doesn't match the sound I really want out of it. I think I might have to route it and install a couple tone knobs. Eh, we'll save that for a while. Right now it's a shred machine with a ridiculously fast neck.

So let's move on to my current playing style. A couple years ago I thought it would be a fine idea to build my own amp. I wanted something with tubes because tubes are sexy. I also wanted relatively low output so I could crank it and it would sound good in church / living room. I stumbled across the best site ever - AX84 - which is a community of super-geeks who have worked up their own schematic for a 5-10 watt single ended tube amp. I built the Little Sahara Sidewinder here from the High Octane circuit. The cabinet's all my own design, with 8" and 10" Jensen speakers. Figure that combo out! It gives it a lot of high end and mid range punch and makes it a KILLER lead amp. It's also single channel and extremely simple which suits my playing style. I don't do well with channel switching. I usually leave the amp almost completely cranked and use the volume and tone knobs on the guitar to dial in the sound I want. I feel this gives the greatest ability to dial in whatever level of crunch you want whenever you want it, and a cranked tube amp has a wonderful level of sensitivity to how hard you hit the strings that can really only be appreciated by playing through one. BTW, that's my Carvin bolt kit. You bet your ass I did the paint job, that's a rattle can special done on my porch in the dead of winter. Would I ever do another rattle can 'burst job? Hell no, that's too much like work. Now that I have decent paint equipment, it's all spray gun for me. Besides, the quality of paint is exponentially higher with a lacquer that you mix up vs. a rattle can which has all kinds of nasty preservatives in it to give it good shelf life. The long and short is that a rattle can job never cures anywhere near the level of hardness that you get out of a spray gun and it will always be soft and prone to scratching.

Enough of all that. The newest axe to enter my household will be my dream guitar incorporating all the design features I want. I've got that beautiful '81 Takamine acoustic finished in wine red up there that I feel needs a partner. (I love that guitar because it was made the same year as me). So the new axe (Little Sahara Sunset) will have the same mojo in the finish - transparent wine red over flamed maple with figured pearl block inlays and gold hardware. I'm going all out on the hardware, gold sperzel or schaller tuning machines (3L/3R). Gold tonepro tune-o-matic bridge and string through body ferrules. Gold volume / tone knobs, gold pickup covers w/ either 2 Seymour '59s or a '59 and JBL in the bridge, haven't decided yet. The electronics will be Les Paul style 2 volume, 2 tone, but each of these will also have a push/pull pot. pulling one set will tap the coils for a single coil sound and pulling the other set will switch from series to parallel wiring. I feel this adds a HUGE range of sounds on but at the same time the LP controls are completely manageable and not overwhelming.

The body and headstock design are all my own. These were spawned from hours and hours with a beer and a set of french curves. All design work is done as Jesus intended - pencil and paper. None of this CAD hooey. Actually, I can't say that, CAD is awesome, but sometimes my designs come out much better when I can feel them. Don't know why... This will also be a 24 fret neck through body design because I love the transition on neck through guitars and they feel rock solid. The neck is laminated from 5 pieces of wood, 2 maple, 2 walnut, 1 oak. Beautiful. The top of the headstock and body are bookmatched flamed maple. The body's top will be lovingly hand carved. Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, 2 way adjustable truss rod. Basically, I'm not skimping on any hardware and taking what I love from everything I've ever played and combining it.

So let's get to work...