The Accidental Luthier

I'm Back!

2010-01-26T18:10:00.003-07:00

I'm back.

Last August I ended up getting asked to coach my nephews football team as there weren't many coaches available in his community. My brother and I agreed to take the job. Each day after work I ended up having a 45 minute commute each way to practice four days a week. I'm also a high school football official so every day but Sunday was filled with football through Thanksgiving.

On Thanksgiving I played in a Turkey Bowl and ended up messing up a knee. I spent most of December chilling out. Last week I had surgery and everything went well. I'm up and at it and finally have some time to start finishing my build.

I've already started up the build. I just finished a fret bender and bought a fret press. I'll update on that stuff in the next couple of days.
I hope all of you are well!

2009-07-12T22:54:00.001-06:00

July 4th Holiday Was Good To Me

2009-07-12T21:24:00.004-06:00

I had a chance to inlay the fretboard. I used a similar setup to last time I attempted this process although I used a precision square as a fence for my Dremel. I also used some straight bits that I got from StewMac.com. Oh lest I forget I also got an air pump that hooks onto the precision router base and blows air onto the area I'm inlaying and clears out the dust so you can see.

Here's my inlay setup:

I I used strips of acrylic as rails on which the Dremel router base could rest. The acrylic strips were secured to the table with double sided tape.

Here is a test fit of the inlays:

Everything fit well so I glued in the inlays with two part epoxy. In the next pic you can see how the inlays stick up a bit:

The next step was to sand the inlays flush with the fretboard using my twelve degree radius block with 120 gritt adhesive sandpaper.

Once the inlays were flush with the fingerboard I used more epoxy that was tinted from the dust leftover from routing to fill in any gaps that were left from the routing process. Worthy of note is that I learned from the mistakes of the last fretboard and taped ever the fret slots before spreading the glue around the top of the inlay. This ensured that I didn't have to clean glue from the fret slots.

Here's the finished product sanded with 320 grit sandpaper:

Tomorrow I will taper the fretboard and maybe even install the frets. I hope to have the binding on by Tuesday.

Peghead Overlay Woes

2009-06-28T23:32:00.002-06:00

On a vintage Les Paul they use a piece of holly (a wood species that works great for inlay work) to overlay the peghead. This holly is usually planed down to around 1/16". I visited my local wood emporium and picked out a nice piece of holly. The stuff is expensive costing around $24 per board foot.

I proceeded to plane the holly down using the same DeWalt planer I used for the body wood. The very lowest setting of the planer actually got the wood to around 3/32" thick. I then cut off a rectangular piece and traced the outline of the headstock shape. Then I used my Dremel to cut out the truss rod adjustment hole. I then lined up the holly on top of the peghead and glued it on. After the glue was dry I used my template routing bit to cut the overlay flush with the peghead. This is what I was left with:

Everything seemed to have gone well but upon closer inspection I spotted a flaw. Can you see it?

If you look at the top right wing of the overlay you will notice that the pointy part is screwed up. This becomes apparent when you compare it with the other side. This flaw made me sick. It turns out the peghead beneath the holly was flawed before I ever glued on the overlay. Because of the color of the mahogany the flaw was hard to spot. I inspected the template I used to cut the peghead shape and found the problem. Somehow the template was damaged so the flaw in it was transfered to the peghead and then to the peghead overlay.

I had three choices to fix the problem:

1. Make a different neck and use the flawed neck for something else.

2. Alter the shape of the headstock into something that looked cool and hid the flaw.

3. Grind off the holly overlay, cut of the wings I'd glued on the headstock, and start over again reshaping the headstock.

I was leaning toward option number two and started mocking up some options for reshaping the peghead. Here are some examples:

My favorite was option number five. The downside is that it looked a bit like the ESP brand's peghead.

Reshaping the peghead has one other disadvantage, the peghead no longer looks like a classic Les Paul shape. To be honest this really didn't bother me as I wanted to personalize the guitar somehow and a new peghead shape would accomplish that task. Still, I was torn between wanting the classic Les Paul shape and something new. My inability to decide between the two shapes delayed the build of this guitar for a couple of months.

Finally I decided that when in doubt go with the original idea. I ground off the holly overlay, cut off the wings, glued on new wings, made a new headstock template without the flaw, cut out the peghead with the new template, made a new piece of holly, cut out the truss rod access hole, glued on the overlay, and finally cut out the shape of the overlay.

Here's the new peghead:

I have cleaned up the overlay a bit and it looks great. I planed the overlay down to 1/16". I also started to plane down the back of the headstock to thickness using the oscillating spindle sander. My new Kluson tuners arrived so I will be drilling the tuner holes this week. The top middle part of the headstock still needs a little carving because the router will not quite finish off the intricate shape.

Remember how I screwed up my first fretboard? This week I will be inlaying the new fretboard and hopefully cutting the taper, fretting, and installing the binding. I'm hoping to have this guitar ready for finish in the next couple of weeks because I need it for a gig in August.

Getting the Rest of the Carve Right and Finish Sanding

2009-05-06T01:23:00.005-06:00

I finally got around to finishing up the recurve on my top carve. To get it where I wanted it I used my scrapers. It's awesome how well the scrapers carve once you figure out how to use them correctly. I also painted the top with a flat black so I can sand and see the flaws.

A little more on the black paint. The paint is helpful because as you sand the paint off the guitar the low spots will retain the paint. It is important to sand out these low spots or the finish may have flaws. The key is to keep sanding until the black paint disappears which means the low spots have been sanded out.

Binding Part 3

2009-05-06T00:33:00.008-06:00

Sorry I haven't been around for a while. My job schedule has changed leaving me less time to work on the project. Also this is my twentieth year as a baseball umpire and since the season is here...... Last time we left I'd successfully corrected my binding channel issues. With that done it was time to redo the binding. Here's how I did it: I cleaned up the body with naphtha and then masked most of the mahogany on the side so I could protect it from the glue. This technique worked well and I recommend it. In my last attempt at gluing on the binding I used some glue that's designed for the task. I later learned that there is another way. One of the two ingredients in my new binding glue is acetone. For those who don't know acetone is the primary ingredient in fingernail polish remover. In fact, most fingernail polish remover is 100% acetone. You can buy acetone at Home Depot in a industrial looking container but I chose to go down to the drugstore and get the same fingernail polish remover the hot chicks use. I figured that this choice might add some mojo to the finished instrument.

The other ingredient in my new binding glue is the binding itself. Actually it is pieces of binding cut up very small. The tiny pieces of binding are added to the acetone and melt. It's the combination of the acetone and binding that make the glue. The reason this acetone/binding glue is so good is that it is literally liquid binding. If there are gaps it will fill them with the same ABS plastic from which the binding is made. This glue also sets much more quickly than the stuff I'd previously used. I used two ounces of acetone and a bunch of bits of binding. I left the mixture for a couple of hours and then started stiring. Sure enough the binding pieces were beginning to melt in the acetone. I knew that the melting process was going to take far longer than a few hours so I let the mixture sit overnight and until four pm the next day. When I came back and stirred the mixture was the consistency of Elmers glue. This worked out perfectly for my purpose. The ratio of acetone to binding bits is a little bit of a guess. I just kept adding binding bits until it looked like the glue would come out ok. I used a plastic glue stick to spread in the channel. I tried to work from the top and really worked to try and only have minimal squeezout. I failed because I had plenty of squeezout. After I spread the glue on roughly three inches of the channel, I held the binding with my fingers. After about two minutes it would set enough that I could let go. I did put some binding tape on the edge of where I spread the glue just to make sure things stayed nice and tight but I probably didn't need it. After the binding tape I'd use a small metal ruler like a spatula and scooped up a lot of the squeezout. I used my el cheapo heat gun (three cheers for Harbor Freight) to mold the binding into the waist and the horn. You really need to be careful not to apply to much heat. My method was to tape the binding in place and then heat it up using the low setting. I removed the tape only when the binding had cooled. The tip of the horn was the toughest. It was the only place where the binding actually stuck out farther than the mahogany. I'm not sure if I pressed it in tight enough or just goofed up routing the channel. This time the mahogany was just a little wider than the binding. One the side I used my scraper and scraped down the mahogany to match the binding. It wasn't very hard as the mahogany was pretty close to being even with the binding. I was most concerned about the tip of the horn. I pulled the tape off and couldn't tell what was happening because of the squeezout. as I sanded the tip into shape I found that I was saved by the acetone glue as I didn't quite get the very tip in as tight as a could have but the glue filled things in nicely. When I finished sanding the tip it appeared to be the same width as everything else. That made me quite happy. There was one tiny gap in the horn about a quarter of the size of a pinhead. It wasn't because the binding wasn't tight it was because there was just a tiny bit of glue missing in that spot. I filled it with the acetone glue and left it. Two hours later I went back and sanded it and this is what was left: Here are a few more pics: Here is a better shot of the horn. Inside the tip of the horn a couple of inches it looks like there's a high spot. It's actually an optical illusion. All said I'm extremely happy. The binding is tight and there are no gaps. It looks really good up close. I'm excited to finish it off with some 320 grit and then finish sanding the recurve. Here's another video:

Binding Part 2

2009-03-01T23:01:00.010-07:00

Last post I detailed my problems with installing the binding. Yesterday I started building a jig to recut the channel. Here are a few pics of what I came up with.I started off with a decent sized piece of 1/2" acrylic and mounted my laminate trimmer to it. A laminate trimmer is simply a lightweight router that is good for jobs that aren't too heavy duty.

I cut some strips of some really crappy 1" plywood with cabinet grade facing and glued them together. They provide the base for the acrylic plate. I then attached the acrylic plate to the glued together boards. I secured my new jig to the worktable with a couple of clamps and this is what I ended up with:

The only problem is that the laminate trimmer wouldn't let the router bit go low enough. I solved the problem by placing the body on one of my router templates which added 1/2". I checked the height of the bit against the body and noticed that things weren't entirely even. The problem was that the bottom of my guitar wasn't perfectly flat. To fix this I took three strips of 120 grit sandpaper with adhesive backing and stuck it to the table.

I then used a pencil and drew a bunch of squiggly lines across the back. This will help me know when the job is done because the pencil lines will disappear as the body is sanded flat. Finally I placed the body on the sandpaper and moved it back and forth across the sandpaper.

A vid to give you a better idea:

This worked great and soon the bottom was flat. I rechecked the body against the router bit for any height problems and everything checked out.I made a few test cuts on scrap and noticed that the StewMac binding router bit with a .060 bit cut the channel right around .0705. The catalog says the bit adds .012 to compensate for glue and wood expansion. When I held the .060 binding (which is slightly larger than .060) in the channel I noticed it was smaller than the channel. I'm sceptical that the glue and wood expansion will take up the extra room but we shall see.

It was time to see if my new binding routing jig worked. Instead of photos lets try another video. Remember I was routing the old binding away while creating a new channel.

I felt I needed to explain a few more things so here's another vid:

Binding

2009-02-28T23:01:00.005-07:00

I was feeling good about the carved top of my guitar. However, the feeling was shortlived.

So what is binding? Binding is a trim that goes around the outer edge of the guitar. It serves an asthetic purpose but also helps protect the edge of the guitar. Binding can be made from all kinds of different things ranging from cellulose to plastic. Not all guitars have binding. The '59 Gibson Les Paul has binding around the top of the guitar body and the sides of the fingerboard.

I had alread routed the binding channel using a 1/2" flush trim bit with a 3/8" bearing. This produced a channel that was supposed to be about 1/16" or .060" if you prefer decimals.

I purchased cream .090" binding from Stew Mac. The binding is made of ABS plastic.

I started by trimming the binding so that it was about 1/8" taller than the top of the channel. It was necessary to leave the binding a little taller on the inside of the horn because of the transition of the carve in that area.

I started by using Weld On brand glue that is supposed to be the best choice for gluing the binding in the channel. My method was to spread glue on about three inches of the channel and then seat the binding in the channel. I held the binding flush with my fingers until the glue started to tack up. I then used special tape to hold the binding tightly against the body while the glue dried. I used a ten dollar Harbor Freight heat gun to bend the binding around the curves of the guitar. The heat gun is really cheap and is really just a blow dryer on steroids.

My plan was to glue the binding up to the horn and then leave it and do the horn the next day. This is a prefered method of many luthiers because the horn is the most difficult area to bind.

The process was sloppy and I had glue all over my fingers. Even worse it got all over the sleeves of my new hoody. Nope the glue didn't come out so now the hoody is only worn when I'm puttering around the garage.

Gluing the binding is difficult. I was fortunate that my dad came out and gave me a hand. Once he joined in the job went pretty fast.

As I stated above the binding is .090" wide while the channel is .060" wide. This means that the binding must be scraped flush with the body. I also stated that the binding is taller than the channel so the top portion must be scraped down as well. Even though I hadn't yet glued the binding around the horn I decided to sand and scrape some of the binding I had done flush with the guitar just to see how things looked. I proceeded to sand the binding flush on the outside and then scraped it flush on the top. as I looked things over I noticed that in many areas the binding had been sanded too thin and wasn't conisistent all the way around the guitar. This really bugged me and I couldn't understand why there was a discrepency. I pulled out my digital caliper that has a depth gauge and measured the channel in various places on the part of the guitar that hadn't yet been bound. It turns out that the channel ranged from .060" to .073" thick depending on where you took the measurement.

It was very difficult to photograph the flaw. This pic came out ok and you can see how the width of the binding fluctuates as it bends around the waist of the guitar.

To be honest the inconsistency bugged me. I had spent all this time working and making everything as nice as I could only to botch the binding job. I think the channel became inconsistent because I routed it prior to carving the top. Over time I think it changed as I lightly sanded around the guitar.

I'm not going to lie, this flaw will probably drive me nuts. My options are the following:

1. Don't worry about it and this guitar becomes a "players guitar".

2. Route out the old binding and start again.

I chose number two.

To be continued........

More Pics

2009-02-28T17:10:00.002-07:00

This is as far as I want to go on the top carve until the binding is in place. I have been comparing it to my buddy Jack's Gibson Les Paul R8 and it's as close as I can get it. I still have some work to do on the recurve and final sanding but that, as stated above, will wait until I've glued the binding on.

Just for kicks I put my the fingerboard I ruined on top just to see how things look. There is also a pic of my new board. Let me know how I did.

I need to update: More On Top Carving

2009-02-23T04:48:00.013-07:00

Sorry folks I've had some schedule changes at work that are kicking my butt and updating the blog has been difficult. Not to worry the guitar has actually progressed quite a bit. I'm going to try and get everything up to date this week starting with this post. I cut the pickup plane angle. When it was all said and done it ended up being around two degrees. I messed up and started the cut about an eight of an inch on the wrong side of where the neck ends. I'll clean it up when I finish the carve. The carve is coming along nicely. I've been using a combination of my finger plane and flap sanding wheel that fits on my power drill. I've been roughing things out with the plane and then cleaning it up with the flap sander. So far so good. I'm going to carve the rear last. I need to map out the bridge better. If there was one thing I would change about my topography on my template it would be to make the steps in the rear close to the tailpice. As it stands now I'm going to have to use and rasp or something to rough out the back because the steps are too far from where they should be. Here are a few pics of where I am so far: Don't you just love that cute little finger plane? I shot some videos of the carving so you can see how the work is being done. They are long and probably boring but some of you will find them interesting. Please excuse the quality. I do not have a regular video camera and have been using my point and shoot on video mode. It's also obvious that I'll never be a news anchor.
In this one I just carve away. I also show where I'm at at the end.
Another quick vid. I'm actually much further along than this.

Here are a couple more pics of the carve: I'm very happy with the progress of the carve. It has been difficult but I'm comfortable with the decision to carve the top by hand rather than with a duplicarver. It has been a very educational experience. This week the updates should come pretty quickly as I try to get caught up so pay attention or you will get behind.

Carving the Maple Top

2009-01-22T02:27:00.004-07:00

It was time to decide how I was going to carve the top of the guitar. Initially I was going to use a friends duplicarver. A duplicarver is a device that can replicate a carving easily. Unfortunately my friend has moved so I had to find another method. Some builders carve entirely by hand. I decided on a hybrid method using power and hand tools. I drew out the topographic lines on a piece of MDF that I routed to the exact shape of my guitar. I also mapped out the bridge, tailpiece, and pickups and made rough representations of them. The next step was to route the neck mortice in the mdf template. This was necessary because I didn't have a centerline to work with on the neck side of the guitar. By routing the mortice I gained access to the centerline. The template is used as a guide for the router. The next step was to use the bandsaw to cut around the outermost topographical line. I then affixed the template with double-stick tape. I decided to try and take a video of what I was doing. You will have to pardon me I haven't done this before and my presentation skills are less than stellar. I shot this with my digital camera so pardon the sound and my breathing hard. It turns out that the mic is located a little close to my mouth.

That's it. The carve went great. I even started sanding things down just to get a feel for the amount of work I have left. I also pulled out my finger plane and used it to start the carve on the horn. Here's a pic of the finished rough carve: And here is a pic of the horn after using my ringer plane on it for about ten minutes:

Wow, I'm glad that's over!

I'm happy with one exception. This carve brought out some weird grain/mineral (actually I don't know what it is) spots on the lower rear of the body. That's the weird brown blob you can see in the pics. The grain I don't mind so much but the mineral stuff is kind of black. I'm hoping it disappears as I sand in the recurve. If it doesn't that part will be under the darkest part of the burst so it shouldn't stand out too much.

Time To Do Some Catching Up

2009-01-20T23:43:00.000-07:00

I've slacked off updating this blog so I'm going to attempt to catch up in the next few days.

I had the opportunity to cut the neck tenon. I've been debating how to do it for quite some time. I finally decided just to do it with the table router.

This method worked great because I hadn't yet tapered the neck and the sides of the neck were square. I was able to keep raising the cutter height until I had a perfect fit. I was also able to do the bottom end of the tenon the same way. A word of advice if you use this method: don't route the material off the tip of the tenon until the end as it helps support the neck and keep the neck.

FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The neck fits perfectly. It was tight enough I could pick up the body while just holding the neck. The centerline matches up dead on as well.

Here are a couple of pics with the fingerboard placed on top:

I was ambitious so I glued the wings on the headstock. I tried to match up the grain as well as I could but it wasn't perfect. I'm not really worried about it as I'll be putting an ebony or holly peghead veneer on the headstock.

Tapering

I purchased two long pieces of acrylic that were also very straight with the intention of using them to help me make a neck tapering jig. For whatever reason I dreading building another jig. While thinking about this it occured to me I could just use double sided taple and attach these boards directly and use them as router templates. I drew the taper on the neck and then placed one of the boards in line with the taper. I attached the other one as well but only to keep things level.

I then used my trusty Stew Mac template bit to route the taper.

I went really slow and eventually I ended up with this:

I forgot to mention that I routed the taper about 1/16" larger so I'd have a little room to carve. The process worked well. I was on such a roll I decided to use the same method for my fingerboard only this time I'd taper the exact size.

I was amazed how well this worked on the rosewood. My bit was going through the wood like a hot knife through butter. I got one side done and then reconfigured the acrylic guides to do the other side.

About five seconds prior to routing the other side of the fingerboard I reminded myself to double check that I was routing the correct side. Evidently five seconds is too long for my memory to work.........

You guessed it, I routed the first side again and since the guide was lined up with the other side I ended up with this:

I was unvelievably angry at myself. All that time I'd spent inlaying the board has now gone to waste. This is the first unrecoverable error I've made on this guitar. It was a costly error too as the cost of a new fingerboard and the inlays is about $60.

Even after a night of sleep I was still sick about the mistake. I really needed a victory to make me feel better. I decided to get busy with the headstock so i used some acrylic to make a routing template. The template worked great and this is how it ended up:

The router can't get into the top middle of the headstock where the two halves of the open book meet. I was going to use files to complete the cut but I kind of like the look how it is and may just leave it. It's softer but visually appealing. What do you guys think?

I've very happy the headstock came out so well. It took some of the sting out of wrecking my fingerboard.

As for the fingerboard I'm thinking of various things I could do with it. For sure I'm going to use it to practice fretting. After that I'm thinking about seeing if I can use a grinder and remove the inlays. If not I'll just mount it on the wall to remind me not to be stupid!

Gluing the Inlays

2009-01-08T19:59:00.003-07:00

I'm posting two new posts today. Please scroll down to the post below this to see the start of the inlay process.

Today I had the opportunity to glue in my inlays. I used the fast setting two part Stew Mac epoxy. Honestly I kind of wish I had bought the stuff that cured a little more slowly and I would have liked a bit more time to fit the inlays. Things did work out well with the quick curing stuff so I'm not complaining.

After the inlays had a couple of hours to cure I put some 120 grit sticky sandpaper to my 12 degree radius sanding block and sanded the inlays flush with the fingerboard. Then I mixed some epoxy with some of the rosewood dust I'd collected when I routed the inlay cavities. The rosewood dust turned the epoxy a color that would match the fretboard. I put on some latex gloves and then used my finger to spread the epoxy on top and around the edges of the inlays to fill in any gaps. I left that to cure for a couple of hours and then sanded again with the 120 grit. The gap filling wasn't quite perfect so I repeated the process and this time it worked great! The smaller gaps disappeared entirely and you really have to look close to see the larger ones.

This is what the fretboard looked like after a flush sanded the inlays and then put epoxy on them to fill the gaps:

I finished sanded with 320 grit. Here are a few pics of the completed inlays:

As you can see some epoxy got in the fret slots. I now need to figure out a way to clean then up.

I'm very happy with how the inlays came out. I've had real Les Pauls that had far more gaps around the inlays.

Inlay

2009-01-08T19:26:00.002-07:00

Yesterday I had the chance to do the inlay on my neck. I bought the neck from Stew Mac pre-radiused and pre-slotted. The Mother of Pearl inlays came from Grizzly.com

I knew the inlay had to be centered so I spent a lot of time figuring out how I needed to do this. The first thing I needed to do was mark the center of the fingerboard. I had already marked the centerline on the back of the fingerboard so it was easy to transfer the line to the top:

It was also necessary to mark the horizontal center in between each fret in which there is an inlay.
At this time it was necessary to decide How I would mark the fretboard. I decided to use masking tape. I layed out a length of the tape on my granite countertop. I then proceeded to mark the horizontal center and a vertical centerline on the tape.

I also made the same marking on each inlay:[IMG]http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f68/shakarocks/Les%20Paul%20Build/Jan%207/DSC00856.jpg[/IMG]
You can see on one of the above photos that I aligned the vertical and center markings on the tape with the same markings on the inlay and then traced the outline of the inlay on the tape. After the outline was traced I used an exacto knife to cut out the shape of the inlay

I then peeled up the tape and placed it on the fretboard. I aligned the markings on the tape with the markings on the fretboard. This ensured that the inlay would be dead center.

Here's the board all taped up. If you look at tape for the lower frets you can see how I took a Sharpie an colored inside the tape. At this point I hadn't decided if I would leave the tape in place or just use the outline of the Sharpie.

As stated before the fretboard was pre-radiused. I also needed to radius the inlays. I stuck the inlays to a flat surface using double-sided and color them entirely with a pencil. Then I stuck some sandpaper to a radiused sanding block (12 degrees in this case) and start sanding. Once the pencil markings disappear entirely the inlay is radiused. I'd like to publicly thank Greg at BCR Music in Pennsylvania for the tip.

I have never attempted an inlay and really haven't used my Dremel much so I thought I'd practice on a piece of mahogany:

I used double-stick tape to attach the fretboard to the flat top of the table saw and then also used the tape to attach to long, straight pieces of acrylic that is used as a platform for the router base. (I left the brown protective paper backing on the acrylic.)
I had three sizes of spiral upcut buts for routing out the inlay. I chose the biggest bit and started hogging out material on each fret. When the dust got bad enough I couldn't see I would just move up the fretboard to the next inlay.

I swept up the sawdust from the inlays and placed it in a bowl. I will used it to color the epoxy I use to glue them in.
I got the cavity as close as I could and then switched to my smallest bit which is really tiny. In fact I accidently broke it working on the last cavity. Here's what the board looks like routed with the inlays fitted:

If you look at the above picture you will notice a block of wood attached to the acrylic with double-sided tape. I used this block as a fence for my Stew Mac router base so that I could at least make sure the top and bottom of each cavity is straight. Incidently the Stew Mac router base is worth every penny. My only complaint is that I wish it were a bit wider because sometimes it would fall off my acrylic platform when I got to the wider parts of the higher inlay cavities.
Here are a couple more pics. Inside the bowl is the rosewood dust I saved. I'm hoping it's plenty.

All things considered the process went very well. In fact I found using the Dremel to route the cavities to be rather enjoyable. There are a couple of small gaps that should disappear when I fill them with epoxy tinted with the rosewood dust.

I was going to wait to glue the inlays until after I'd successfully tapered the fretboard. I've since decided against this because I believe it would be better to sand the inlays flush with the fretboard having parallel edges. I'll glue the inlays in tomorrow. I also want to taper the fretboard. I've purchased a long piece of acrylic to make a tapering template.

Fitting the Truss Rod

2009-01-03T00:41:00.002-07:00

So now that I have this nifty new truss rod slot I guess it's time to fit the rod. A few weeks back I bought a a long piece of maple at my local hardwoods emporium. This board was already planed to 1/2" and its sole purpose was to be the filet used to plug the slot.

The first thing that needed to happen was to get the board planed to close to 3/16" which is the size of the trus rod slot. You don't want to make it too small or it will have a loose fit. You don't want it too tight as all of the glue may squeeze out. So I ran the board through the DeWalt planer until it was close and then test fit it in the slot. I kept planing the board down a little at a time until it fit perfectly in the slot.

Next I marked out fret positions on the board and then used the curved truss rod jig to draw the curve on my filet.

The truss rod access slot is the place where the truss rod sticks out at the headstock. This slot is necessary so that you can turn the truss rod nut with a wrench. To cut this slot I used a 1/2" bowl\cut bit (the top is shaped like a bowl). I put the fence on the router and set it so that the bit would follow the truss rod channel. I then adjusted the height of the bowl cut bit so that it would hit the headstock in the perfect place. I then ran the headstock over the bit about 1 1/2".

Here's what the channel looks like after being cut:

Honestly I wish I'd have used a 5/8" bowl cut bit just to make the slot a bit larger. I tried to widen the adjustment channel out with my Dremel but started to mess up the look of the slot so I quit. The washer and nut that fit on the rod must have a squared up area to rest against so I used a chisel to flatten the edge of the access slot. Here's what it looks like when the washer and nut are installed:

If you look at the washer you will notice that the top edge has been flattened. I flattened the edge with a bench grinder.

The other end of the truss rod must be anchored under the 21st fret. To accomplish this you must first trim the rod to the proper length and then use a tap on the end of the rod to cut the threads. When the threads are cut you can thread the anchor onto the rod. When the anchor is threaded as far as it can go you use a hammer to peen the excess rod up against the anchor so it will not turn. The proper tool for peening is a ball-peen hammer but I didn't have one. Instead my dad had this old hammer that worked about the same.

When the anchor is securely fitted to the rod you need to cut a slot for it in the neck. For this I used a forstner bit on the drill press. I can't remember what size I used but it fit the anchor perfectly.

I've seen some builds where the luthier mounted the anchor horizontal instead of vertical using a Dremel to hog out the necessary wood for the anchor slot. I'm not yet good with a Dremel (although I need to practice to do the inlays on the fretboard) so I chose to use the forstner bit and mount the anchor vertically. The anchor stuck up a tad so I used the bench grinder to whittle down one end a bit.

Back to the maple filet. I used the bandsaw to cut the curve on the filet and then smoothed it by hand sanding. I then fit the curved side down into the truss rod channel making sure that the fret markings on the neck and the filet matched up. When I pressed down on the filet I could feel the truss rod flex to accomodate the curve.

I decided I had a little too much of the filet sticking out of the topof the truss rod channel so I whittled it down using a disk sander. I almost forgot to make a smaller filet to fit the chanel on the other side of the anchor.

When I bought the wood for the filet I also bought some Tightbond Liquid Hide Glue. Hide glue is the traditional glue for luthiery. The reason hide glue is popular isn't so much that it holds well (although it does) but that parts glued together with it can be disassembled with a hot knife. The use of hide glue is the reason you can take the neck off a set neck guitar. The Tightbond version of hide glue is different than regular hide glue because it comes in a bottle. Regular hide glue is actually pellets that are dropped in a pot of water that is being heated by a hot plate. The pellets melt in the hot water and make glue. Kudos to Tightbond for inventing a more convenient version of hide glue.

Even my Tightbond Liquid Hide Glue wasn't without its quirks. I had it stored out in the garage where it is 45 degrees F. When I went to use the glue it had the consistancy of ballistics gel. I knew that I could warm up the hide glue by placing the bottle in a pot of warm water but I didn't want to wait. I pulled out the regular Tightbond II and used it instead. Tightbond II can also be a little thick when it's cold so I made sure the heat in the garage was at least 60 degrees F before gluing. Gluing the filet can be tricky because you do not want any glue leaking onto the truss rod. The easiest way to accomplish this is to only apply glue to the filet surface and not the walls of the truss rod channel. When you insert the filet into the channel the glue will the migrate up towards the top of the filet instead of down into the channel. After inserting the glued filet you then clamp it in being careful not to make sure the filet is tight but not TOO tight. Clamping also ensures that the rod bends to match the channel.

All these operations were being performed on NYE so I went party hopping for several hours before I came back and removed the clamps. Not to worry I also left the heat on in the garage while the glue was drying.

The next day I removed the clamps and inspected my work. Everything seemed fine so I preceeded to start trimming the filet flush with the neck. I used the disk sander to trim off most of the excess filet. When the filet was small enough I used my new 10mm IBEX finger plane to make the it very close to flush with the top of the neck. The finger plane proved to be the perfect tool and I only had to sand a bit to finish the job.

Whew, that went better than I'd hoped! I was feeling so good I decided to tackle fixing the neck mortice in the body. If you scroll back a few posts in this blog you will remember that I sort of screwed up the sides of the neck mortice. I fixed it by routing an additional 1/16" from each side of the mortice. Learning from past mistakes I was able to accomplish the fix without any errors. As you can see most of the burned wood on the sides is now gone. The small gash I made inside the mortice is also gone. Of course this alteration means I will have to widen the tenon on the neck an additional 1/16" on each side. No big deal.

My next task is to cut the tenon on the neck and the test fit the neck to the body. Hopefully I will have some time accomplish this during the weekend. I'm also starting to plan the top carve of the body.

I hope you enjoyed this submission. Please feel free to leave comments!

The Mystery of the Curved Truss Rod Channel........Solved!

2008-12-29T22:45:00.003-07:00

From Wikipedia:

A truss rod is a guitar part used to stabilize and adjust the lengthwise forward curvature (also called relief), of the neck. Usually it is a steel rod that runs inside the neck and has a bolt that can be used to adjust its tension. The first truss rod patent was applied for by Thaddeus McHugh, an employee of the Gibson company, in 1921, although the idea of "truss rod" can be encountered in patents as early as 1908.

If you didn't understand that I'll explain a bit more. When a guitar is strung up and tuned to pitch the strings exert quite a bit of pressure on the neck. Most of the time the pressure is so great the neck will bend forward. This forward bend must be corrected in order for the guitar to play properly. The truss rod is designed to correct the forward curvature cause by string tension. When the truss rod is tightened the neck straightens out. The truss rod is placed in a slot cut down the middle of the neck. The type of rod determines how deep the slot must be cut.

There are two types of truss rods I've considered for this build. The first is a vintage truss rod originally designed by Gibson. It consists of a long, round piece of 3/8" (approx) steel with an anchor on one end and a nut on the other. The nut is used to tighten the rod and straighten the neck. The other kind of rod is a dual action truss rod that consists of two round pieces of steel attached at both ends.

For this build I chose the vintage rod because that is what they used in old Les Pauls. Actually they still use them in current models. A vintage truss rod is a type of spring. When you tighten the nut the rod tries to straighten itself out. The straighter the rod gets the less effect tightening it will have. For this reason the channel the rod sits in must be cut with a curve in the bottom of the channel. The curve ensures that even if the neck is straight the truss rod still has a bit of tension in it. This tension allows the rod to put the neck in a backbow if necessary. This graphic (I believe drawn by John Catto) illustrates how a curved truss rod fits inside the neck:

After the slot is cut for the rod and the rod is placed inside the rod is covered by a strip of wood called a filet. In this case the filet will be maple. The bottom of the filet has the same curve as the bottom of the truss rod channel.

OK, so the big problem is how to cut the curved channel. There has to be some kind of jig to perform this function. Thinking about how to carve the curved channel almost led me to use the dual action truss rod instead of the vintage. The reason is the dual action rod requires a straight channel which can be easily cut with a table saw.

Finally after a ton of research I ran across this thread at the TGP forum. That thread is full of great jigs and advice offered by some of the best luthiers in the business including Roman Rist, Jack Briggs, Terry McInturff and Scott Lentz. In page five of the thread Scott Lentz has a jig that he uses for cutting a curved truss rod channel. One look at his jig convinced me that I could easily build something similar.

Now I had to build the jig for cutting the curved truss rod channel. Here's what the finished jig looks like with the neck mounted on it:

The construction is simple. You need a planed board about 30" long, 8-10" wide, and about 3/4" thick. I found some poplar at my local hardwoods store that fit the bill nicely. You mark where a few frets are for reference points. Then you take your truss rod and bend it a bit while you trace the shape of the bent rod into one side of the wood. I got the idea of tracing a bent rod from Roman Rist who I communicate with on another forum.

To shape the curve of the rod into the board you could use a band saw but I chose to use my oscillating spindle sander. It took me about ten minutes to rough out the curve with the spindle sander. I then finished it off sanding by hand.

I put the neck on the jig and used it to help place the clamps. I made it so the clamps touch the neck on parts that will eventually be cut away. I screwed the clamps into the maple and the jig was done.Here's a good top view where you can see the curve in the board in relation to the neck:The other piece of wood you need is something to mount the hold-down clamps. In this case I found some scrap maple at the wood store. It's perfect for the job. I got the clamps for five bucks each from Harbor Freight. I'm not a fan of Harbor Freight but for things like the clamps it's good. I screwed the maple onto the poplar like this:

I put the neck on the jig and used it to help place the clamps. I made it so the clamps touch the neck on parts that will eventually be cut away. I screwed the clamps into the maple and the jig was done.

If you look closely at the above picture you will be able to see the curve in the jig. By looking at the relation of the jig to the top of the neck you can see that the board is wider at the ends of the neck and virtually even with the neck in the middle.

One of the biggest pains of this project was finding an arbor long enough to mount a 3/16" slot cutter at the proper height. Most arbors are 3" long which isn't long enough. While I was at the tool store I eyeballed a router bit that was a little over four inches long and had room for two cutters separated by a bunch of spacers. I think these types of bits are used on moldings or something like that. I asked the salesperson the price of the bit and he told me it ran around $160. Yeeeech. It turns out I was able to buy the just the arbor and a bunch of spacers for around $30.

I bought a 3/16" slot cutter with the arbor and used the 7/8" bearing that came with it for the new arbor. When I set up the new arbor I found I didn't have enough spacers to reach the threads at the top of the arbor. Without more spacers there would be no way to tighten the locking nut of the cutter. I ended up buying another 7/8" bearing as a cheap way to add another spacer. Here's what the cutter looked like when I finished putting it together:

Here's how the whole thing works. The 3/16" slot cutter/arbor is mounted in the router table. The bearings follow along the edge of the jig that has the curve of the rod. As I get into the middle of the jig the curve of the jig gets deeper. At it's deepest point this setup should cut a channel of 1/2". I can manipulate the depth a bit by pulling the neck closer to the edge of the jig or pushing it back. you set the height of the cutter so that it hits the centerline of the neck.

I did some preliminary testing on this setup and found that the bit struggled when cutting the slot and burned the wood. Seriously as I was cutting the garage filled with smoke. Not long after I found I had mounted the cutter backwards and it was cutting the slot with the blade going backwards. DUH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I turned the cutter over and the blade cut perfectly. In fact it cut a perfect channel.

Here are some pics:

At it's deepest the channel is exactly 1/2" deep:

The rod fit perfectly in the channel:

Now I have to cut the maple filet that goes above the truss rod. I'll do that tomorrow and maybe even install the rod!

It goes without saying that I'm very relieved this went so well. I'm very happy that I now have a great way to carve a curved truss rod channel.

Going Overboard

2008-12-21T21:34:00.003-07:00

The body thing still bugs me a bit although most of my annoyance is gone. However, a week or two ago I was still torn up by it. I decided to turn my attention towards the neck of the guitar.

Prior to the start of this project I ordered a neck blank from Stewart Mac and rough cut a neck out of it. When cutting out the blank I made rookie mistake. I figured I'd make my first cut with a table saw. This cut would be on the underneath portion of the neck and extend from the tenon all the way to the bottom of the headstock. I started cutting on the tenon side of the neck and stopped about an inch and a half from the back of the headstock. Then I took the neck over to the bandsaw to trim the rest.

As I trimmed out the back of the headstock with the bandsaw I noticed there was a big notch cut out of the back of the headstock. My big mistake when making the cut with the table saw was not stopping a few inches behind the headstock. The problem is I was seeing the blade of the table saw from the top which stopped well behind the back of the headstock. However the blade is circular and the part of the blade you can't see actually sticks out further. It was the part of the blade that I couldn't see that bored into the back of the headstock and left the notch.

All was not lost. I had just enough room on the neck blank to redraw the neck and cut it again. I just moved everything back about an inch. This gave the new back of the headstock just enough room to miss the notch. I had to compromise during the redraw to miss the notch so the headstock is about 1 1/8" thinner than is specified in the plans.

Fast forward to the middle of December. I have been struggling with some of the procedures I need to perform in order to build the neck. One of those is how to carve a curved truss rod channel. I'll cover how I'm going to do this in the next blog post. I'd settled on a plan and needed a maple board in order to make it work so I headed to my local hardwoods emporium. Just for kicks I asked the guy if he had any quartersawn mahogany around that was big enough to construct a neck blank. We went over to the mahogany and found a great board that was big enough to construct three necks. I bought it along with the maple. I went home and got to work and this is the result:

Yup, three new necks! The top neck is the original. Notice how the headstock (the short part that is angled) is thinner than the others. The neck is usable but not for the guitar I'm' building. I have something else in mind for the original neck.

So what am I going to do with the other three necks? One will go on the guitar I've been writing about. I haven't decided what the other two will go on but I'm thinking a Les Paul with a quilted maple translucent blue top and a Les Paul Custom with a Bigsby vibrato. Anyone have any ideas?

My camera ran out of batteries so I can't show the steps for roughing out the neck. I will give a brief description how it's done.

The first thing you want to do is true up the blank. This means making sure that it is square. I did this with a table saw and a jointer. I then inspected the blank so I could avoid any worm holes or other problems with the wood. Once I'd decided which side of the blank would be the fretboard side I began to draw the profile of the neck on the blank. This is done with careful measurements and a protractor. The protractor is used to draw the angle of the headstock and also the angle where the neck meets the body.

This time I rough cut all the necks with a bandsaw. Of course I can't cut perfectly straight with a bandsaw so the wood was a bit jagged along the cut. It occured to me that I could even out the top of the headstock with the jointer. In checking out the builds of others I've never seen it done this way so it was a risk. The risk paid off and I got a perfectly flat and smooth surface that didn't need any sanding. For any that may try this technique make sure you run the nut side of the headstock through the jointer first. If you run the tip through first you could experience tearout. Here's a pic of the top of one of the headstocks.

As noted in the picture I used an oscillating spindle sander to sand out the jagged stuff on the back of the neck. I finished up with a rotary sander.

Once the necks are roughed out you want to mark out the centerline and the places where the tenon will be cut.

Marking the centerline is easy. You just measure the width of the neck and then use a t-square to draw the line.

Marking the tenon is more difficult. You still remember what a tenon is right? The tenon is what fits into the mortice we already cut in the guitar body.

The tenon measurements must be exact or the neck will not fit properly into the body. The key is to make sure the centerlines of both the neck and the body match. For the top of the tenon you base all of your measurements off the centerline. The lines going across the width of the neck represent frets. The lines running the length of the neck represent the tenon and the wood outside of them will be removed.

The neck meets the body at the front of the sixteenth fret. There are two lines drawn here. The one on the left is the actual fret dead center. The one on the right represents the front edge of the fret which is where the neck meets the body.

This side view represents the profile of the tenon. Remember my routing the body four degrees to accomodate the angle of the neck? If you look at the profile lines of this neck you will notice that the same four degree angle is incorporated into the neck where it meets the body.

The line on bottom represents the bottom of the tenon and the line at the end represents where the tenon ends.

So why didn't I cut the tenon? It's simple. I need the side of the neck to be flat along its full length to cut the curved truss rod channel. Tomorrow I will build the jig to make this cut. I'm also waiting for a part I need for the router bit. The part should be here on Tuesday December 23rd.

I ordered a preslotted and radiused rosewood fretboard for this project a long time ago. I finally got it out to see what it looked like on top of a neck blank.

I'm also going to try and do the inlay (I've got the inlays and the tools for routing the fingerboard ready to go) this week as well.

Those of you that own Les Pauls know that the headstock isn't as wide as it should be. This is because on wings (additional strips of wood) are glued on to widen the headstock. Yes, this is how it is done on a real Les Paul. The reason for this is if you use a neck blank wide enough to make the full headstock you will waste a bunch of wood when you cut the taper in the neck. Remember that the necks are 1 11/16" at the nut and widen to slightly over 2" at the last fret. By making the neck blanks smaller and gluing on wings you can get more necks out of a billet. (A billet is a large board in its rough form before you cut neck blanks out of it.)

The next post will be about cutting the curved truss rod channel. This deserves its own post simply because it has caused the most stress. You will understand why when you read the submission.

If you're reading this blog please check in by making comments. I know a few who are following but I've heard there are a bunch of lurkers. Let me know what you think and give me some ideas for the next two Les Pauls.

Neck Mortice

2008-12-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been slow but I've been working some freaky hours and my sleep cycles are all screwed up.

The '59 Les Paul uses a mortice/tenon system for attaching the neck to the body of the guitar. One of the key differences between a vintage Les Paul and a modern version is the tenon. The vintage Les Paul uses a long tenon design that extends into the hole that's routed for the neck pickup. The new Les Pauls use a much shorter tenon. The long tenon is thought to sound better but the short tenon is cheaper to manufacture. Way to cater to the accountants Gibson.

The mortice an tenon have a male/female type of relationship. The tenon is the male and the mortice is the female. What happens is you slide the tenon of the neck into the....

Awe crap this is getting sexual. I'll just show you.

In order to carve the mortice in the body you need a template. This time I chose to make my template out of clear acrylic. I took a rectangular piece of acrylic and used a utility knife to score a line down the center. Then I measured out the length and width of the tenon and scored that with the knife as well. Then I took three small very straight pieces of acrylic and glued them on the lines I scored. These straight pieces of acrylic serve as the router guides for cutting the template.

The brown stuff on the bottom of the acrylic is actually a protective backing that you peel away.

Here's the piece routed with the backing still on:

And here's the finished template:

Remember the neck angle I cut in the body? The mortice template is attached to the body with double sided tape on the part where the angle is cut. The centerline I scored on the template lines up with the centerline of the body. The centerline ensures that the route is perfectly aligned. The mortice is 1.5 inches wide so I used a 1 3/8 inch forstner bit on my hand drill to hog out some of the material. This saves the router blades some stress.

To finish the cut out comes the router with a template cutting bit. You align the bearing on the template and proceed to cut out the mortice. I took out about an eighth of an inch worth of material with each pass.

After I got down far enough I was able to remove the acrylic mortice template and just use the actual mortice as the template. I did have one problem. The depth of the cut is 1.5 inches but my bit was only an half of an inch. Even with my router set at the lowest depth I couldn't route far enough down. The nearest place that sells router bits is Sears at Fashion Place mall. I know I know, Sears has a bit of a reputation. I picked up an inch long template router bit at Sears that actually worked very well and was just as good of quality as my more expensive bits. Yaaaaaay!

So I routed down to the depth of 1.5 inches. The mortice looked perfect but as I ran my hand along the sides at the spot where my smaller bit started to become inadequate I noticed some slight wavyness to the cut. The reason for the waves is I pulled the half inch bit as far out of the router collet (a collet is the part of the router that grips the bit and holds it in place) as I dared but in doing so the bit developed a slight wobble. Let this be a lesson to you would be woodworkers that you need to have more than a quarter inch of your bit's shank in the collet.

To fix the problem I put the smaller bit back in the router and started trueing up the route above the waves so the bearing would be able to ride on the perfectly routed upperThe portion of the mortice. This is when the router broke. Most routers have a dial that can be used to lower the bit when you are trying to increase the depth of cut. When I was tightening the bolt that secures this dial the assembly broke. It's ok because I also have access to a really nice DeWalt router.

The problem with switching routers at this time is that I was unfamiliar with all the adjustments of the DeWalt. I loaded the shorter bit in the DeWalt thinking I'd go down as far as I could with the shorter bit and then switch to the longer. Being unfamiliar with the DeWalt I accidently lowered the collet of the router lower than the actual router base. The result of this error was I started routing and then smelled something burning. I had a momentary brain fart and went down both sides of the mortice before I looked to see what exactly the problem was. The stupid collet (actually I shouldn't blame the collet I should blame myself) had dug into the top side of the mortice and made some ugly, burned looking, gouges in the top of the mortice.

I'm not even going to start on the words that I uttered when I saw the damage. In fact I'm pretty sure I invented some clever epithets as a result of my stupidity. As I inspected the rest of the mortice I noticed that when I'd pulled the router out I gouged one side a little bit about an inch down. This had officially become a bad day.

There is good news. The errors mean exactly nothing to how the finish product looks and plays. The burned gouges along the top edge will disappear under the fingerboard when it's glued on. I will correct the slight gouge in the inner part of the mortice by simply routing the mortice 1/32" wider on each side and making the tenon of the neck slightly wider to match. While this isn't perfect to the '59 Les Paul spec it is workable. Actually the specs of a '59 Les Paul vary slightly from guitar to guitar so it wouldn't surprise me if some of the mortice and tenons on those guitars were slightly wider than the norm.

When it's all said and done I can live with the result. The only disappointing thing is that everything had gone perfectly with the body up until this point and now it wasn't perfect. However if I sold you the guitar without you seeing how it was built you would never know that I'd made a mistake.

Neck Angle Nervousness

2008-12-02T18:09:00.005-07:00

Today was the big day. I finally got to route the neck angle into my guitar body. I'll be honest, this particular operation has had me worried since I started exploring the idea of building a Les Paul guitar. It requires tooling that can't be bought and must be built. (Well they probably make some industrial gizmo that can do this operation but I don't know what it is and if I did I probably couldn't afford it.)

For those of you who aren't familiar with the construction of a Les Paul guitar I'd like to explain a bit about the neck angle. On a Les Paul the neck glues into the body on an angle somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5 degrees. The reason for the angle is the strings need a little height so they can properly align with the bridge of the guitar. I also suspect that playing comfort might figure in to the equation although I have had a number of guitars that use a straight angle that are comfortable to play. In fact most electric and almost all acoustic guitars have zero neck angle.

I can't remember exactly the angle that my plans specified but I decided to stick to a whole number and chose 4 degrees. I'm pretty sure this will work out fine.

In my past submission I showed some pics of my neck angle jig. While the jig is my own design I was heavily influenced by the jigs others have made for performing this task. Some of you are probably wondering what a jig is. The word has many meanings but in this case a jig is defined as:

Jig - A device used to maintain mechanically the correct positional relationship between a piece of work and the tool or between parts of work during assembly.

Thanks Websters...

My jig works by placing the guitar body inside being careful that the body sits square with the front of the jig. The back of the jig is elevated using blocks until the jig is sitting at the desired angle. The routing guide is placed on railes that run along the inside edge of the jig. The routing guide has a hole running most of its length that the router bit sticks through. If everything goes according to plan the angle of the box will be the angle of the cut in whatever material you are routing. The cool thing about my jig is it will also function as a thicknessing jig (poor mans planer) if you just use it laying flat.

Time for some pics

These are the blocks that I cut to hold up the back of the jig. The notch in these blocks is cut slightly over 1 1/4" high which, when considering the length of the bearing edges of the jig, put the box at an angle of exactly 4 degrees. I never thought I'd need trigonometry after my freshman year of college but it's necessary to figure out the heighth of these blocks. To keep things steady I used double stick tape to hold the blocks on the workbench.

This next pic shows how the box sits on the blocks. Also note that I also put some scrap wood along the each side and the front of the jig to keep it from moving. This scrap wood was also affixed to the workbench with double stick tape. These blocks did the trick and the jig didn't move.

This pic shows the front of the jig. You can see how I've used scrap wood with double stick tape to secure the front of the jig. It also shows why I made the front edge of the jig lower than the back. I do this so the router guide and the router bit can slide past the front edge of the jig to get in front of the material being cut. I guess I could have done the same with the back but I didn't. The guide the router sits on is made of MDF. I cut the slot in the guide using a table router with a fence. The place on the guitar body where the neck meets the body is the only straight part of the guitar body and is exactly 90 degrees in relation to the centerline of the guitar. I have to use this spot to align the guitar body with the front of the jig so everything is square. I had the bright idea to put the body as far to the left as I could in the jig while still keeping the body square in relation to the jig. The idea turned out not to be so bright. I'll explain later.

I decided to test the jig on some scrap wood before I began cutting into my guitar. I rigged a small piece of scrap mahogany into the jig and proceeded to cut. The jig worked ok but there were small marks from the router bit left in the wood. There are several reasons for this. The first was I was going to fast when trying to make the cut. Second was I didn't sand the rails on the jig well enough which made the router guide change height a bit as I moved it backand forth on the rails. Third was my MDF router guide was flexing a little bit under the weight of the router.

I couldn't make a new router guide but I did work on my routing technique and sanded the rails so they were perfectly flat. I then tested the jig again with a piece of scrap maple and while there were still router bit marks they were much more faint than the last test.

I then decided the jig was working well enough to put my guitar body inside and give cutting the neck angle a whirl. I got the body aligned, the router guide clamped, and placed the router in the jig only to find out that my router bit wasn't long enough. Grrrrrr. The nearest place that sold router bits is Sears so I went there and found a bit that was a half inch longer. Buying the router bit from Sears was a leap of faith. I've used enough different router bits on this project to know that not all bits are created equal. Sears tools are great for your average home mechanic or hobby woodworker but they aren't what most professionals use. As it turns out the Sears router bit was about eight bucks cheaper than its equivalent at my favorite industrial tooling store and performed just as well. To give Sears its due the hand router I've used for most of this project is an old Craftsman which is a Sears brand. I have two DeWalt routers available to me as well but chose the Craftsman for this project.(The others were set up for some other projects.) The Craftsman router has peformed like a champ and in my opinion is plenty good enough for a hobby builder. If I were to become a professional luthier I would probably go with a Porter Cable or a DeWalt simply because they are industrial grade which means they will last longer under heavy use.

So I set the height of the router bit, (The same height as the top of the binding channel) took a deep breath, and started cutting. I lucked out, the jig works! I took this pic looking down through the hole in the router guide.

Those marks in the hole of the router guide were made when I attempted to lift the router out of the guide before it stopped spinning. Oh well, I'd already decided to make a better router guide when I finished this operation.

I proceeded to slowly work my way down the guitar body by moving the router guide an inch or so and then cutting again. In this way I slowly cut the angle in the body. However, as I mentioned above there was one problem: By placing the guitar body in the jig as far left as I could I ended up not being able to cut all the way across the body because the router ran out of room. If you look at the top of the next pic you can see where I ran out of room to finish the cut. You can also see slight marks left by the router.

To correct the problem of not going far enough over I had to realign the body in the jig and then make the same cut out to the side. For whatever reason the bit cut at a slightly lower depth when I took routed the material on the side of the body. It really doesn't matter because this wood will be removed when the top is carved.

When I took the body out of the jig here's what it looked like:

In the above photo you can see some of the marks from the router guide flexing. This is nothing that couldn't be cured by two minutes of sanding. If you look at the left you can also see where the depth changed when I realigned the body in the jig.

There you have it. For the most part the jig worked as intended. I plan to rebuild the router guide using something that will not flex with the hope that the cut will be a little more accurate. I'm just happy things went as well as they did. Here are things ended up after a few minutes of sanding: (The body is discolored a bit because I rubbed naptha on it before taking these pics and it had partially evaporated by the time I took the pic.)

I will now breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Next up? Routing the neck pocket.

More Routing Fun

2008-11-29T22:59:00.002-07:00

I'm writing this blog just after I posted the last so be sure to scroll down and read about cutting the binding channel.

A trick I picked up over on the MyLesPaul.com forum is that you can cut another channel where the top of the binding is supposed to be. This channel will serve as a reference for carving the top. What the channel tells you when you are carving is, "don't carve below this point". Opinions vary on how tall the binding is supposed to be but I carved my channel at 6mm high which is how tall I think the binding should be.

For this cut I used a rabbeting bit. A rabbet is a type of cut used to join two pieces of wood. While the cut I'm making isn't a rabbet the bit works for my purpose.

Here are some pics after finishing the cut:

Notice I didn't cut all the way around. I did this because I wanted to be sure that I didn't interfere with my neck angle cut and I didn't want to screw up the carve inside of the horn. If necessary I can go back later and cut some more. The cut was a little larger than I would have liked but it will not matter when the body is carved. I'm actually really excited to have reached this point.

One other thing I have been working on is a jig for cutting the neck angle in the top of the guitar. I've seen a few ways to make this cut and this is the jig I built to do it:

As you can see the body fits inside of the box. The top of the box has rails that will serve as tracks for a router guide.

Here's a pic of the guide resting on the rails. Note the hole in the middle that will let the router bit pass through.

The back of the box will be propped up until the box is tilted at four degrees which is the angle I will cut in the front of the guitar body so the neck fits correctly.

Actually making the cut will probably happen on Monday.

Finaly Getting To the Binding

2008-11-29T21:25:00.003-07:00

Ok, I finally had some time to get back to work on my Les Paul project. It kind of sucks when real life gets in the way of your hobbies but that's the way it goes.

I wanted to get the body to the point where I can start carving the top. There are three things in the way of doing the carving: routing the binding channel, routing the body to accept the angle of the neck, and routing the mortice for the neck. I can carve the body without routing the neck mortice if I want so I'm putting off the decision as long as possible.

For my readers that don't have a lot of guitar knowledge binding is a strip of plastic, wood, or cellulose that encircles the guitar body and sometimes the fretboard. Mostly binding is decorative although it can help protect the edges of the body. Most Les Paul guitars have binding only on the top edge of the guitar body. However Les Paul Customs also have binding on the bottom of the guitar and Les Paul Studios do not have any binding at all. The '59 Les Paul is they type that has binding only on the top.

I bought Cream ABS binding from Stewart Mac. The Les Paul binding is .060" thick. In order to get this thickness after sanding you actually want to buy a thicker binding. The binding I purchased is .090" thick. It will be scraped down to the proper thickness once it's glued to the body. The binding I bought is also pretty tall and will be scraped down to the proper heights as well.

There are a few different ways to cut the binding channel. I chose to use a template router bit with a bearing that is smaller than usual. In this case I used a 1/2" router bit with a 3\8" bearing. This setup will produce a 1/16" channel. I did some test cuts on scrap wood and the channel this produced ended up being more like 3/32". When I set the binding in the channel it fit right in and was just slightly too wide. I figure when it's scraped down it will be almost perfect.

Here are some pics:

First is the bit. Sorry it's fuzzy. You can see the 3/8" bearing on the 1/2" bit:

When starting this type of cut you want to go slowly. This means you don't cut the full depth of the channel at first. I started by routing a shallow channel and then increasing the depth of the cut a little at a time.

In an earlier post I wrote about the wood sometimes tearing out. This happened when I was routing the channel. Fortunately the tearout happened at a depth that will not affect the binding channel and will be carved away. Here's a pic of the wood that was torn out. I placed it next to the place where it came out although you can't see the hole.

I kept adjusting the router depth until I reached 5/8" which is supposed to be the height of the maple top. My top is just shy of 5/8" so I just routed down into the mahogany a bit until the 5/8" was reached.

Here are some more pics of the completed channel:

Here are a couple of shots of me holding the binding in the channel. It sits just slightly wide of the channel which is perfect.

In related news I started feeling a need to protect the body of the guitar. I felt that just having it laying around on the work bench while I was doing other things was probably a recipe for disaster as mahogany dents easily. So I got online and found a really cheap case that fits Les Pauls at Guitar Center for $49. When I went over to Guitar Center to pick one up I found they didn't have any in stock. As I was walking out I noticed that in the entrance they had a bunch of used cases that they were selling for $20 each. I dug around in the pile of cases and ended up finding a slightly used version of the case that I originally wanted. Even better when I opened it up and checked in the storage compartment I found a perfectly good Korg chromatic tuner. Being an honest dude I brought the tuner to the attention of the door greeter. He went with me to the cashier and told her about the tuner. She notified the manager and they decided to give me the tuner with the case. So for $20 I got a cheap but servicable case and a decent tuner. No this will not be the case for the finished guitar.

Second guessing

2008-11-12T16:36:00.003-07:00

I'm now to the point with the body where I'm about to do some things that can't be easily fixed if I screw up. As nature intended I started to second guess myself as well. I started to do some research and came across a thread on a Les Paul forum where the size of the body was discussed. In this thread it mentioned that the picture of the body on the Stew Mac plans is actually too big. Another person posted a range of measurements taken off several different Les Pauls. The body I have made was a few millimeters too big in almost every aspect.

I just spend an hour using a disk sander and an oscillating spindle sander to put the body within spec. I also took the opportunity to square up where the body and the neck come together.

I love the Stew Mac plans but the pic isn't really accurate. I searched for measurements to determine the width of the body but they weren't listed. The plan does say that some things may not be to scale but the ommission of the body width in various places is glaring. Now that I've sanded the body where it's supposed to be I find it's much closer to the Catto plan than the Stew Mac plan. Oh well, live and learn.

I'm really excited to have this out of the way because now I can route the binding channel and route for the neck angle.

The Body and Top Become One!

2008-11-07T04:47:00.003-07:00

I finally had time to glue the maple top to the mahogany body. This process is simple enough. Slather on a bunch of glue and clamp those suckers together. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out that way.

I routed the top and body from the same template so you'd think they would come out exactly the same shape. This of course didn't prove to be the case. They were very close though. I figured I'd line them up the best I could and then take care of any discrepancies through sanding. Next time I think I will attach a roughly cut out piece of maple to a perfectly cut out mahogany body and then use the mahogany body as the template to route the maple. I think this would ensure that they line up perfectly together and save me a lot of sanding in the end.

I got some Titebond 3 glue that I had left over from an amp cabinet build and proceeded to spread it on the mahogany body. I just put enough on to cover the body liberally.

Then I put the maple top on top of the mahogany, clamped it, and presto I've successfully mated the top to the body. Wait. What is going on here? There isn't any glue squeezing out from the seem where the two pieces meet.

Whenever you glue two pieces of wood together you should have something called squeeze-out. Squeeze-out is the excess glue that leaks out from the seems. If you don't see any squeeze-out you probably haven't used enough glue.

Figuring I didn't use enough glue I unclamped the pieces of wood and pried them apart. What I saw surprised me. The mahogany actually soaked up a bunch of the glue and what glue was left didn't cover much of the maple. Not only did I not use enough glue I REALLY didn't use enough glue. So I slathered a bunch more glue on the mahogany body and then slathered a bunch on the maple top then stuck them together and clamped.

Wahoooooooo, squeeze-out galore!

Ummmmmmmm, why do I have so much squeeze-out? Seriously it's not stopping. Uh oh, it's now all over the clamps and the table and the........

Ok, I put too much glue on which is better than not enough glue but a whole lot more messy.

So I got a rag and started wiping up the excess glue. While doing this I realized something. Remember the wiring channel that runs between the control cavity and the pickup selector switch? Well that channel (now more of a tunnel really seeing as I covered it up with the maple top) was now filling up with the excess glue and if I didn't find a way to clean it out I would never be able to run the wires.

There's no way I could get a rag into the channel because it's approximately a half inch wide and a half inch tall. I had to find a solution. Fortunately I'm the proud owner of a Remington Wingmaster shotgun. Part of owning a gun is knowing how to clean it. To clean a gun you use a rod with a piece of cloth or paper attached to one end that is thrust into the barrel. I figured I could do something similar to clean out the wiring channel. Snooping around the garage I found an old choke cable from some car. The cable was flexible enough I could get it in the channel and had a small but sturdy piece of wire jutting out of it at one end. My plan was to cut up a rag into small pieces, hook these pieces to the wire end of the choke cable, and then thrust the wire with the cloth on the end in and out of the channel.

This method ended up working pretty well. I must have used fifteen different pieces of cloth to clean up the mess in the channel. Here's what my impromptu channel cleaner looked like:

Here's a pic of the mahogany body and maple top clamped together:

One other thing about gluing. It is possible to apply too much pressure with the clamps and squeeze out too much glue. I was careful to get the clamps tight but not too tight.

I left the guitar overnight. Unfortunately I do not have pictures when I took the guitar out of the clamps. I thought I'd wiped away all the sqeeze-out but it continued to ooze out for quite a while. When I took the clamps off I had a mess on the side of the body. No big deal because I had to true up the edges of the body because the mahogany body and maple top didn't fit perfectly together to begin with. I used a sanding wheel and the trusty oscillating spindle sander to remove the excess glue and match up the edges. I'm glad I had these tools because hand sanding would have taken forever due to all the squeeze-out.

I'll take a pic of the finished body for the next blog. Currently I'm building a jig to route the neck angle into the body. Hopefully I'll get to that in the next couple of days.

Routing the Top

2008-11-04T20:20:00.004-07:00

So you would think that routing the top would be as straightforward as routing the body. It's not. Maple is much harder than mahogany and has a tendency to want to tear out (a big gash appears if you don't route it right) at the end grain.

First I roughed out the shape on a band saw. Then it was time to start routing.

I decided to use the router table with the template router bit with the bottom mounted bearing to do the top. First I taped the template to the top. When I cut the mahogany I cut a depth of about 1/4" at a time. Since I was only using the table router with the mapleI decided just to cut the entire 5/8" top all in one swoop since the bearing of the bit had to reach all the way up across the maple to the template.

The key with this was to just take off a little bit of material at a time. I did this by not forcing the bearing through the excess wood all the way to the template. I just used the router bit to slowy shave off the wood until the bearing finally hit the template. This worked out pretty well although in some spots the wood burned a bit.

One important thing I left out. Usually you route counter-clockwise. However when you get close to areas where end grain could be a problem you want to route clockwise because it helps prevent the end grain from ripping out.

Here are some pics of the finished top resting on the mahogany body. I posted multiple pics so you could get a better idea of the flame pattern of the wood.

Next up gluing the maple top to the mahogany body.

Routing the Cavities

2008-11-04T19:38:00.004-07:00

Once the mahogany body was routed so it looked like a guitar it was time to route out the control, wiring, and pickup switch cavities. I used the templates I previously made for this purpose.

The first item of business was to attach the template to the newly routed mahogany body. One mistake I didn't make is to go crazy with the double sided tape. This time I cut out four small squares of tape and used them to attach the template. I also used a bit of tape along the edges just to keep things stable.

I started with the control cavity. There was no reason to wear out my router bits to get rid of all that material so I used forstner bits to hog out most of the material:

Once I got a bunch of the material out it was time to break out the template routing bit with the top mounted bearing and start finishing the cavity:

Just like when I cut out the body the router bit wasn't quite long enough to finish the job.I finished the job with a table router with a template router bit with the bearing mounted on bottom.

Here's what the control cavity looks like finished.

For the pickup switch cavity I just used the same 1 3/8" forstner bit I'd used to cut the template. I fit the bit inside the template hole and then just drilled down with the drill bit. This technique worked perfectly.

Next came the wiring channel that runs between the pickup switch cavity and the control cavity. I used a seperate template for this. The cavity is approximately a half inch deep and gets covered up when the maple top is glued on.

I was really happy with how the routing went today. The cavities are perfect.

Finally Get to Do Some Cutting!

2008-10-30T00:37:00.007-06:00

So anyway today is a day I've been waiting for for quite some time. I get to actually cut the mahogany body blank.

I was very excited about how the blank came out of the glue. The side that will be used for the back of the guitar is well matched and honestly looks like one piece of wood. The other side is a different matter completely. Here's a pic of it just out of the clamping process:

Can you find the seam? Remember this is three pieces glued together.

So how do you cut these things anyway? First I attached the routing template to the body blank. For this I used double sided tape. For cutting out the templates I used 3M mounting tape but decided it wasn't strong enough when one of the templates slipped a bit. I went to Home Depot and browsed around and ended up with some stuff that's made to keep welcome mats and outdoor carpet from slipping.

Here's the template attached to the board. I worked with the positioning to try and get the best possible wood grain on what will eventually be the body.

I decided to rough out the body by first cutting off most of the wood with a band saw. I try to keep about a quarter inch from the template. I sawed some relief cuts in the places where the body curves. This will help me to be able to cut the curves with the band saw.

Here is the body roughed out.

Here's where the templates really start earn their keep. To cut a precisely shaped copy of the template on the actual wood for the body you use a router. For this type of cut you use a template router bit. The template router bit has a bearing that rests on the template as you route. The cutter is the exact size of the bearing and makes a perfect cut. There are two types of template router bits one has the bearing on top and the other that has the bearing on bottom. In this picture I'm using a bit purchased for this purpose from StewartMac.com. This is the bit with the bearing mounted on top of the cutter.

Look closely and you can see the bearing resting on the template. It's important to go very slow when performing these types of routes. It is also important not to try and cut too much wood. I try to limit my cut to a quarter inch down. Here is the body after cutting out the first and second passes.

Now all I have to do is lower the bit and cut around the body again, and again, and again...... After a few passes the template is removed and you just use the body as a template. In this way you can cut even lower. I did find out the routing is tricky when you go around the horn. On one pass I tipped the router a bit because there isn't a lot for it to rest on. When I did this it gouged out the horn slightly. It's nothing major and will sand out but I wasn't happy. I developed a technique for the other passes where I put my hand on the bottom of the router right above the part of the template the router was resting on. This helped keep the router flat and cutting straight.

I have a a couple of gripes with the router bit I bought from StewartMac.com. The blade is very sharp and cuts fine but it's a little short. I couldn't make it long enough in my router to cut the entire width of the body. Now it's possible that this is a limitation of my router but I still think the bit should be longer. Another problem with the bit is it uses a teflon tube to hold the bearing in place. To me this seems like a squirrelly way to hold the bearing. Other bits use a piece of metal held in place by an allen bolt that rests on top the bearing. Here are a couple of pics that illustrate how much wood was left after I'd reached the limits of the router bit:

To be fair the bit performed well and didn't chatter even though it as a 1/4" shaft. (More professional routers can use 1/4" or 1/2" shafted bits. The 1/2" bits are generally considered more solid performers.)

Fortunately I also have access to a table router. It does the same thing as the hand held but it uses a router that's fixed in place with a bit that points up out of the table. I fitted the other type of template router bit with the bearing on bottom into the table router and then used them to cut the remaining wood off the body.

Here's a pic of the body completely cut out.

I had one other problem with the double-sided tape I used to hold the template to the body. When it was time to remove the template I couldn't get it off. It turns out the tape is a lot more powerful than I imagined. I ended up having to use a paint spatula and pry bar to get the thing loose. Even then there was tape residue on the template and the body. Fortunately I was able to get the residue off by wiping it down with a naptha soaked rag. When prying the the pieces apart I did make some small gouges in the template and the body wood. Fortunately the gouge is in the part of the body that has the maple top glued on top so it will not show. Still I decided to fill the gouges with some plastic wood and sand it down.

Next up is routing the cavities.

Preparing the Mahogany Body and Maple Top

2008-10-29T01:00:00.001-06:00

Ok so I have the wood now what to do with it? Several things need to happen. Both the mahogany and maple need to be run through the jointer (makes the edges straight for glueing), trimmed, and planed to thickness. Once this is done the maple needs to be resawn (the big block needs to be cut in half so that it becomes two boards) and glued together.

The piece of maple I have is ragged on both edges. I need to get rid of rid of the ragged stuff and true up the edges. So the first thing I did is run one edge of the maple through a jointer. The jointer planes off a small amount of the wood and makes the edge straight. Here's my dad running the piece through the jointer:

Once one edge was straight I could trim the ragged edges off and cut the board down to the size where it could be resawn. Here's a bad edge:

I trimmed up the maple to approximately seven inches wide by twenty inches long. The the edges of the maple went through the jointer again to make the both perfectly straight. Now I had a perfectly rectangular board with all the bad material trimmed off. Now the board needs to be resawn to become two pieces. We do this on the band saw. You can see the fence the board rest against. To resaw you put the board on it's side and place it against the band saw fence. then you slowly run the board so that it is split lengthwise. Here's a pic of the setup:

Sorry I don't have a pic of the resaw process but you can get the idea if you look at the saw.

Once the maple was resawn it was time to take care of the mahogany. If you remember the last blog my mahogany was about 60" long. I started the process by trimming the board into three equal lengths on the table saw. I knew when I bought the board that it was a little warped. I'd hoped when I cut the board that some of the warp would diminish with the smaller lengths Unfortunately when the boards were cut they were still slightly warped. The way you could tell the boards were warped is that when placed on a flat surface the board would not sit flat. You could push on a corner and the corner would go down. To fix this I super glued shims to the bottom of each board. The shims made the board sit flat . Then each board was run through a surface planer with the shim side down. Once run through the planer the top edge of the board becomes straight. Here's what the board with shims glued on looks like:

Once the top edge of the board is planed you flip it over and then plane the other side. This way you can achieve perfect thickness throughout the boards length. To be honest there was a slight warp still left in the board after I finished planing but I'm not building a rocket here so the little bit wasn't a big deal. Here's the setup used for planing:

Once all the planing and trimming were done it was time to run the glueing edge of each piece through the jointer again just to make sure the edge was perfectly flat. Then it was time to glue the pieces.

The glue is evenly spread on each edge of the boards and then they are placed together and clamped Here's the mahogany being glued together:

That's Dad's hand by the way. He's helping out on most of the stuff done today. Thanks Dad!

The same is then done with the maple.

One thing I forgot to mention about the maple is that I bookmatched it. To bookmatch you resaw the board and then open the two pieces like you would a book. This causes the grain on each board to mirror the grain of the other board. This will become evident once the board is stained.

I can't for the life of me figure out what I did with the pics of the boards when they came out of the clamps. I will state that I was very hapy how things turned out. The side of the mahogany that will be the back of the guitar literally looks like it's one piece not three glued together. The maple looks lovely bookmatched.

The Quest to Find the Right Wood

2008-10-28T01:12:00.005-06:00

I have been scouring the internet looking for wood for my build. I decided that I needed to give my local wood dealers a shot so I went looking around. As it turns out I was able to take care of the wood for the guitar body. My requirements were a good hunk of Honduran mahogany and a decent piece of maple. Maple is an interesting wood. It can develop a figure in the wood also known as flame. The more figure/flame a top has the more desirable it is. These tops are graded using a system similar to grading the size of a high school using terms like 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, and 5A. The more "A"s a top has the more it costs. I know the following may make some think I'm nuts but I'm not a huge fan of AAAA maple tops. I think that at times they come off looking garish. Here's an example of a good guitar with a really crazy, highly figured, maple top:

My idea for my first build was to just do a plain top. Plain tops show regular wood grain but do not have any flame. When I got to my local wood emporium I noticed that some of their stock had some figure to it. I decided right then I'd try and split the difference between a plain top and a 5A flame top and get something with some figure. I went over a good bit of lumber and ended up with the following piece of curly maple: (I rubbed some naptha on to bring out the grain)

Here's a better picture of the wood grain. Naptha (main ingredient in lighter fluid) is rubbed on the wood to help bring out the grain. Naptha evaporates quickly and doesn't raise the grain of the wood which causes problems later. This particular grain pattern is called fiddleback and is exactly what is used to make the back of violins. It features a tight flame pattern.

The maple is just shy of two inches thick. It will be resawn (cut in half using a band saw) into two 5/8" boards and then bookmatched.

Here is my hunk of mahogany:

The mahogany will be cut into three pieces and then glued together to make one big blank that is big enough to make into a guitar body.

Even more templates

2008-10-26T00:37:00.001-06:00

Ok. I'm back with a new submission. I decided that I needed to make a new template for routing the control cavity and pickup selector switch cavity. The control cavity and the pickup selector are routed all the way through the mahogany portion of the body but the wiring channel is only routed a half inch deep. It was pointed out to me on a Les Paul message board that this would present a problem.

I decided to keep the original template for the wiring channel. In addition to the reason mentioned above I really wanted to do a new template for three more reasons:

1. The selector switch cavity hole was off by a couple of millimeters. I blame it on the spade bit and a lousy method for finding the center of the circle.

2. The control cavity ended up too big in places. While it would have worked I just wanted it to be better.

3. I felt like making another template would give me some good practice.The first thing I did was route a body shape in MDF using the first template as a guide. Then with drops of crazy glue at strategic points I attached a photocopy of the Stew Mac routing portion of the plans to the MDF.

As mentioned in the previous submission I did a crappy job finding the center of the pickup selector cavity for drilling. This time I used the coverplate screw holes on the plan to find the exact center. You can see how I did this in the photo.

In the last template I kept the plans on top of the body when I started boring out the wood of the control cavity. This method wasn't the best as the paper would fray and I'd go to far. This time I did something different. I placed carbon paper under the cavity and then followed the lines with a pencil. It worked so well I decided to do all of the lines with the carbon paper and then removed the paper template. It came out looking like this:

This time I decided to use a forstner bit instead of a spade bit to drill the control switch hole. The forstner bit has a much smaller centering pin which allowed me to place it dead center. Also the forstner behaves better in the drill press for whatever reason.

For the control cavity instead of using a sabre saw I decide to drill out most of the material with two different forstner bits.

Then, like I did with the first template, used an oscillating spindle sander to carefully cut off the rest. This method worked perfectly and with a tiny bit of hand sanding I got this:

I forgot to take a pic of the template finished but I will say that this one is dead on accurate (ok that may be a slight exaggeration) and I'm much happier. Transfering the plan with carbon paper worked great.

Hopefully my mistakes and successes will help others who are contemplating a build. I still have to build the mortice and tenon templates but that should go quick. By the end of the weekend I expect that I'll start building the actual guitar.

More Templates

2008-10-24T23:53:00.001-06:00

I was excited with my success creating a body routing template. Unfortunately there are more templates that are needed. The Les Paul guitar reqires several different routes in the body that require templates. Today I concentrated on the routes for the control cavity, wire channel, and pickup selector. All of these routes take place in the mahogany portion of the body and are completed before the maple top is glued on.

Ok, maybe I need to back up a bit. The body portion of a Les Paul is actually both mahogany and maple. The majority of the body is a block of mahogany that is made out of one, two, or three pieces. The mahogany portion of the body gives the guitar a warm sound. On top of the mahogany is a piece of maple (actually it's usually two pieces glued together) that is 5/8" at it's thickest point. The maple top helps bring out the treble frequencies in the instrument which help the guitar to sound more articulate. It's the combination of these woods that give the Les Paul its signature sound.

I used the previous template I made to create the routing template. I used double stick tape to attach to attach the template to a piece of mdf and then used a template routing bit in a table router to create the new template.

Here I'm routing the template.

Here I'm finished routing. You can see the two templates stacked on top of each other.

I had made a full size photocopy of the Stew Mac routing scheme and proceeded to attach it to the new template. I wanted to test my new Dremel and Stew Mac rounter base so I started by trying to hog out the control cavity by hand. The router base is really cool but I learned a few important lesson the most important being that you should start with a shallow cut and work your way down. This was actually really good practice in handling the tool as I will be using this setup to do my inlay routing.

Routing the control cavity with my Dremel and the Stew Mac Precision Routing Base

Eventually it was time to move on to the scroll saw and get the rest out.

At this time I also used a spade bit to drill out the pickup selector switch hole.

The spade made a perfect hol3 but it wasn't as accurate as I'd hoped because it was a little shaky in the drill press for whatever reason. I think it's because the bit was too long. The hole ended up being a millimeter or two off.

The scroll saw worked great routing the wiring channel as well. I cleaned up the channel with a a thin piece of wood with sandpper around it. I ended up with this:

As you can see the control cavity in the above pic was really rough so I smoothed it out with an oscillating spindle sander. This was the perfect tool for the job.

Unfortunately due to my incompetence with the Dremel the cavity didn't come out an exact replica of what was on the plans. I think a regular control cavity cover will work just fine on it but I'm still deciding if it will bug me enough to make an entirely new routing template with a more accurate control cavity. Up next are the mortice template for the neck routing and the template for routing the tenon. I'm thinking of doing these out of acrylic.

Where to start?

2008-10-22T02:30:00.000-06:00

So how do you build a guitar? I really had no idea up until about a year ago. I was surfing around the net and found some message board sites that catered to people who wanted to build guitars. One of them is dedicated to Gibson Les Pauls. It was these websites that made me realize that I could actually build one of these things. The best part is these sites have some excellent luthiers who are willing to answer questions and help you along.

To build a guitar you must first have a way to cut out the parts. In the case of a Les Paul you need to cut out the body, neck, a mortice (or neck pocket), tenon (the part of a neck that fits in the mortice), and various control cavities.

A 1959 Gibson Les Paul is constructed using a body that consists of a 1.75 inch mahogany body with a 5/8 inch maple cap on top. The neck is made of quartersawn mahogany.

To help with the build I purchased a set of technical drawings from StewMac.com. These drawings detail all the measurements and shape for a 1959 Les Paul. There are also plans on the web drawn by John Catto. I downloaded John's plans and took the file over to Kinkos where they have a large format printer. I made several copies of the StewMac plans and the Catto plans so I could compare them and use the copies to help me build my templates. The copies were dead on perfect size.

Most builders (who don't have CNC machines to do everything for them) use routing templates to cut the body shape into the mahogany and maple. You also use templates for routing out control cavities, pickup cavities, mortice, and tenon.

As I begin my build I have had to decide what to do about templates. My original plan was to buy pre-cut templates from a builder on the net. However, I remember reading a message board post where the builder stated that making the templates was educational and kind of fun. I decided to attempt to build my own templates. If it didn't work then I could always buy the commercial variety.

I began to compare the Stew Mac plans with the Catto plans. It turns out the plans aren't exactly the same. This is not a big deal as they probably took their measurements off different guitars. (Back then the same model guitar had a little bit of variation as they were mostly hand built.) Ultimately I decided to go with the Stew Mac plan simply because it had all the neck drawings included in the plan. The Catto plan is excellent (especially for the price, thank you John!) but since this is my first build I wanted to go with the most detailed plan.
I went down to Home Depot and bought a decent size piece of 1/2" MDF. My plan was to use the MDF to make the template.

The next challenge was how to get the Stew Mac plan onto the MDF. There are a couple of methods for accomplishing this. Previously I explained that I had been down to Kinkos to make some copies of the plans. While there I had a copy made of just the body. The copy is the exact same dimensions as the Stew Mac plan.

I came up with two different ways to get the shape of the guitar onto the MDF. The first was to lay the new copy of the Stew Mac plan on the MDF with the middle attached to the MDF with double sided tape. then I would place a piece of carbon paper between the plan and the MDF and then trace the shape. The second was to either glue or tape the plane to the MDF.
I decided to go with plan number two go with double-sided tape to attach the plan directly to the MDF. Here's what the back looks like with the tape:

I then attached the plan to the MDF.
Since the band saw was out of commission I decided to use a scroll saw to cut out the template.

As you can see in the pic I tried to leave about an 1/8" around the border of the template. I figure it's better to rough cut then sand things into shape. Here's a photo of where I finished the rough cut:

Now I needed to touch up the roughed out MDF. I figured that I should use a razor blade to trim out the outline so that I can sand down to the edge of the Stew Mac plan. You can see how part of the edge in this pic is trimmed with a razor and part isn't:

I decided to use a disk sander to smooth out the rough edges of the MDF. I was careful to try and stay with the body contours. The key to this was to use a really light touch with the MDF barely touching the disk sander. Another benefit to the disk sander is it corrected any edge errors the scroll saw may have made when it wasn't perfectly upright.

The disk sander wouldn't get the waist curves or or horn of the guitar so I used an oscillating spindle sander. This tool has various sizes of spindles so you can come close to matching the curves. Again a really light touch must be used as the spindle sander will really take off the material if you aren't careful with the pressure. Check the different size of the spindle in these pics:

I finished up the job by hand sanding the template. This removed any remaining burrs. I did sand into the plan a bit in a couple of areas but blended the errors in nicely. I figure it's not a huge deal as most of these guitar weren't exactly the same shape. I did pay special attention to where the neck meets the body as that has to be straight.
Here are pics of the finished work featuring the front and the back:

If I had to do it over I would have glued the plan onto the MDF using a roller to apply the glue evenly. I found that the parts of the edge where I didn't have double sided tape tended to get a bit ratty when I was working with the various sanding devices. This would not have happened if I would have glued. The double sided tape did hold things without slipping but I think the glue would have been better.

I will probably use this template to make another template out of some solid kind of board. MDF isn't exactly the sturdiest material. I've also considered trying to use acrylic for some of the templates.

Next up making a template for routing the control cavity, wiring channel, and pickup selector cavity.

Why?

2008-10-19T21:47:00.000-06:00

I was blessed/cursed with siblings that were quite a bit older than I was. One side-effect of my comparative youth was that I was exposed to rock music at a very early age. Yup by the age of three I knew who Santana, Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, The Osmond Brothers, and even Iron Butterfly were.

My sisters fourteenth birthday was a pivotal day for me. As a present she received a sweet Pioneer Centrex stereo system as well as a bunch of albums. That night she begged me to come into her room to hear this awesome song. Being the seven year old (I turned eight two days later) music connoisseur that I was I obliged. She handed me the cover while she dropped the needle on the record. The cover had a bunch of old women on it. Needless to say I wasn't too impressed. I was even less impressed when the song started with some dude singing acapella (technically there was a really soft kick drum for accompaniment but you could hardly hear it) about his mama and being on the run from the long arm of the law. I didn't want to hear some acapella singing as my seven year old heart wanted to rock. I told my sister the song was lame. She told me just to sit still and shut up. Pretty soon the song started to build with some harmony vocals kicking in. Then all of a sudden some dude screamed, "yeah" and this song with the mellow introduction kicked into overdrive and rocked me like no other song had before.
The song was Renegade by what would come to be my favorite band Styx.

From that point on I knew I had to play guitar like the guys in Styx. I became obsessed with the instrument. In short order I knew that Tommy Shaw played a Gibson Les Paul Custom and James J.Y. Young played a sunburst Fender Stratocaster. I even knew that they used a one of a kind overdrive pedal called the Yoshinerator built by J.Y.'s college classmate and friend Yoshi.

Yep I had the bug. A few years later at the age of twelve I was looking in a dumpster at a nearby condo development and spied an electric guitar that had been thrown away. As I pulled it out of the dumpster I noticed that the headstock had been snapped off. I searched around and found the headstock and took the whole mess home with me. I guess it's a good thing I didn't find some weed or I might have taken it home and become a pothead! This is a picture of a different guitar but it was the same make and model.

Even at a young age I knew my way around tools so I puttered around in my dads garage until I found two metal plates. I drilled holes in the plates and attached with screws one plate to the front and one plate to the back of the broken headstock. This coupled with some Elmers glue fixed the headstock break enough so the guitar could be strung up and played. Oh yeah the bridge was also missing so I fashioned a small piece of wood into a makeshift bridge. A year later I purchased a Gibson Tun-O-Matic bridge with my paper route money and installed it.

I was always messing with the Kay. I repainted it a bunch of times. I even added forearm and tummy contours so it would be more like a Fender Stratocaster. By the time I was fifteen I had upgraded to a Kramer guitar with a Floyd Rose.

That was the beginning. I ended up learning to play reasonably well by the time I was in high school. I even played in my high school Jazz band for a year. Of course the requisite garage bands were started and disbanded. While Styx is still my sentimental favorite band I developed musical tastes ranging from Depeche Mode to Iron Maiden. I'll admit it, U2 is tied with Styx as my favorite band.

A whole slew of guitars followed at various points. I've had guitars built by the following manufacturers: Gibson, Fender, Gretsch, Hamer, Kramer, Jackson, Charvel, Takamine, Guild, Larrivee, and probably a few other manufacturers I'm forgetting.

My two favorites were a early version of the Jimmy Vaughn Tex-Mex Fender Strat and a 1976 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe. The Fender is the only guitar I've never sold and will stay with me until I die. I've customized it a bit and had the frets leveled. It plays as good or better than any Fender Strat I've ever touched. I get compliments on it all the time. An interesting note was that the parts in this guitar were made in the states and then shipped across the border to be assembled and painted. Here's a pic of me playing the Strat. Please note the cool Utah Jazz warmup top I'm wearing.

The 1976 Les Paul Deluxe was an interesting bird. I bought it from a buddy/band mate in the mid-nineties. A normal Les Paul Deluxe has mini-humbucking pickups but this guitar actually came with factory installed Gibson P.A.F. pickups. It also had a sandwich mahogany body with a plain maple cap and a maple neck instead of the usual mahogany. The reality is that this guitar had the electronics of a Gibson Les Paul Standard with the body and neck of a Les Paul Deluxe. Whatever the combination the guitar was magic. It had incredible tone and it played like butter. Even better was it was actually somewhat valuable because of the strange combination of parts and materials. To the right is me playing this Les Paul.

My Les Paul played loads of gigs and studio sessions. I acquired it in used condition and took pretty good care of it. Eventually the guitar started to experience worn frets and became harder to play. I had heard that refretting Gibson Les Pauls was an expensive proposition and a pain in the bum. A few years ago I ended up getting a really good offer for the guitar and sold it.

Selling that guitar was pretty much my biggest mistake ever. I tried to replace it a couple of times with various Les Pauls but none of them were even close to as good. The price of new Les Pauls has risen dramatically in the last several years but the quality has lagged. You can read about Gibson's problems here.

I really need a Les Paul. They have a unique tone that is necessary for my current music projects. What do you do when you can't buy a decent newer model? You can either investigate other high-end guitars made by manufacturers like Hamer and Paul Reed Smith or you can............build your own.

While I love Hamer and PRS guitars guess which choice I made.