I wanted to do a 3/3 and its kind of derived from an iceman. At least thats how it started. I must have gone through dozens of roughs to get that far.
Going to do mahogany body w maple top. Maple laminated neck and ebony fretboard and head plate with maple binding on the neck and headstock and maple pickup rings for contrast.
I was thinking of maple binding on the body but decided to just do faux binding.
This time I used my planer to thin down the laminate strips. My manual says not to plane thinner than 1/4″ but I was able to get down to 1/8th which saved me some time and kept me from using a safety planer.
Last time I did this I used WAY too much glue and made an absolute mess. This time I cut some notches into a plastic scraper to spread my glue like you do tile adhesive and it worked very well. I also followed some advice I read here and used a wet rag to clean up the squeeze out before it dried.
Another problem I had last time was all my laminate strips sliding all over the place while I was clamping them up. This time I was a little more prepared and used some smaller clamps on the ends to keep them from sliding until my main clamps were tight.
And the finished blank trued up on my new 4″ bench jointer. It was so much easier to do with a power tool.
Here is the lumber I’m going to be using. The large piece of birch plywood is going to be made into a router sled as others have built here with the extruded aluminum.
Hers a few more pics.
I got my plans printed out and made my templates.
The tops that I bought for these have been sitting in my garage for 5 months and in the process they slightly warped. I tried a bunch of things including wetting the concave side with water and laying the concave side down in the damp grass and letting it sit in the sun. Didnt work so a tried wetting them down and clamping them to a 3/4″ thick flat piece of aluminum I have and letting it sit for 2 weeks.
Didnt help. I have a planer but that wouldnt work. What I needed was a large jointer.
The next logical thing to do was to construct the router planing sled I has already planned on doing which came out nicely.
I used some beefy extruded aluminum to minimize any deflection. I used PTFE tape on the contact surfaces so it would glide smoothly.
No pics but I used this to flatten out the tops and the body mahogany. I went out and bought a 1.25″ mortising bit and It worked great.
I glued up my body blanks. My friend and I bought our mahogany from a place in San Diego called Frost hardwood but we did so on two separate occasions.
When I bought mine they had some beautiful dark mahogany but when we bought his they were out of the darker stuff (African I believe) and all they had was this lighter stuff. Because his blank was narrower we would have to make his body a 3 piece.
The three piece clamped up in the back. If you look at the darker piece of mahogany on the right you can see I was playing with the idea of gluing in a maple stringer. I decided not to because I was thinking about how I would be able to stain the mahogany and leave the maple stringer a natural color. Simple tape it off I thought? I was worried about potential complications so I left it off. if anyone would like to offer advice on how this should be tackled I’m all ears because I’d like to try it in a future build.
One of the tops ready to cut out.
Yeah it’s pretty big. Its 30″ x 20″. An engineer friend gave it to me. It used to be a base for some big medical laser gizmo and its been ground dead flat on one side so its pretty handie to have around. Its heavy as hell and must weigh 40 pounds.
Here are a few more pictures. Cutting out the tops and bodies. I cut in a line about an 1/8th inch away from the actual cut line to give myself a safety zone when I’m glueing up.
Once I got the tops and bottoms cut I stacked them up and started rethinking how thick of a body I was about to create so I decided to reduce the mahogany thickness by about 3/8th so I put it back on the sled.
A cake knife works great to help unstick the two sided tape i use to attach the wood to the router sled.
Next comes the electronics cavity route before I glue up.
I hogged out the cavity with a forstner bit then set put it on the router table.
Here is the finished route. Above it you can see the pile of spool clamps I made. Stewmac sells 6 of these for $26 bucks plus shipping.
I used a 4′ x 1.25″ dowel, some 5.5″ machine bolts, some wing nuts and a package of cork I got from the craft store and they work just as well. I made 22 of them for about $35 bucks and an hour and a half of my time. Thats about 3 bucks cheaper per clamp than Stewmac.
These are going to make sure my edges have no gaps during my glue up.
Glued up the top using the new spool clamps.
I cut pretty far away from the edges to give myself some room for error but I’m thinking a little too much so I’m going to have to route this is several passes to avoid any potential tear out.
I took my time with this and avoided any tear out so far.
Switched bits for the reverse side then routed the back round over.
I’m happy so far.
Next I’m going to cut the neck out and install the truss rods I got from allied luther after waiting for a month for the new stock to come in.
Once I got them cut out I flattened the backs to spec with the router sled.
One of my blanks was a little thinner than I wanted so I had to alter the neck angle from 14.5 degrees to 12.5 degrees to keep it a one piece. I’m hoping it wont be a big deal because its done now.
Then to cut my truss rod slot. On my first build I did this after I cut the neck shape out and it complicated things quite a bit. So this time I’m doing it the easy way BEFORE I cut the neck shape out.
To do this I started to use the plastic table fence that came with my router for the first time and found out its absolutely worthless So I used a piece of mahogany I had that had been run through my jointer. It worked much better. I know this is probably rudimentary stuff for some of you experienced builders but I’m still learning.
I need some reaffirmation on this because I’m having a hard time finding a definitive answer. On my first build I used a hotrod truss with the two round rods so this wasnt an issue but this is my first time using a truss rod with the one rod and a flat piece of steel welded on one side.
Its kind of embarrassing but I have these in backwards and these should go in with the flat steel side up correct?
I cut this using a small gouge then went on to fitting a piece of 1/4″ maple over the TR nut.
Sanded the small radius with a drill bit.
Before I glued this piece in I took a small piece of folded over card stock and used it as a temporary shim over the nut.
Set up my sander to make some this strips of 1/4 walnut.
I glued the strip of walnut over the truss. This insures I wont have any problems with glue fouling my truss.
You can see here how the shim gave a nice gap over the TR nut. I used a japanese saw to cut off the excess wood here.
And here is the finished truss install.
A little more progress.
For starters I got my parts in.
And my first screw up. My bandsaw has a small gap just to the right of the blade that I didnt really take into consideration. I used it to cut my fretboard and ran it down each side thinking I had done fine untill…..
..I turned it over and saw all this tear out.
I immediately thought I had trashed some expensive ebony. I couldnt really do much so I put the template I made on it to see if I could salvage it.
It fit pretty tight and I had my doubts but ran it through anyways to see if It could be salvaged.
In the end I managed to save it out of pure luck. The bottom edge still has some rough edges. If I wasnt going to bind it I would be screwed I think.
Let me explain. My design calls for an ebony neck which I had intended to dye jet black (using Fiebing’s Oil Dye) with some simple inlay followed with maple binding.
I had planned on first doing the inlay, then radiusing the board to level the inlay. Then I planned on dying the board as to keep the dye from migrating onto the maple binding and obviously as not to sand off the dye during the radiusing process (duh).
Then I planned gluing on the maple binding, then a little more finishing work on the radius to bring the binding to the same level as the board and then working my way up with finer grit sandpaper to final finish the fretboard finishing with 1000 grit. ( I plan on fretting it after its shaped and finished)
I’ve done a test on some scrap ebony and am running into problems. Mainly that the dye is getting slightly sanded off because its not soaking deep enough into the ebony and secondly and more importantly, the ebony dust is horribly fouling the maple binding when sanding. I tried blowing it out with a compressor and also tried using some alcohol and I cant seem to remove all of it.
I’ve read that naptha can work but I dont have any handy. I’m going to buy some today but I really dont know how much more efective its going to be than alcohol.
I did read in another forum to use a scraper on the binding to bring it level vs. sandpaper. I dont have a scraper but tried this with a razor and it seemed to work decent but left an less than desirable inconsistent edge. It was also tediusly slow as my binding is a good 3mm taller than I need. Maybe this is the solution and I just need to practice my scraping technique.
For the dye sanding off I tried re-dying the ebony after the binding was applied and leveled by masking off the binding using 3m vinyl automotive masking tape. It worked well on my first test piece but on the second test piece some of the dye bled into the maple where the fret slots are.
I should say on my first test piece I radiused the board with the binding then carefully sanded just the maple edge using a fresh piece of paper as not to foul it with the ebony. Very tedious. Then I reverse masked off the ebony and added a few strokes of tru-oil to just the maple. After the tru-oil dried I masked off the maple then sparingly applied the black dye with a rag. As a side note here I thought I could get away with not wearing a latex glove while dying such a small piece and I now will be wearing black fingertips for the next few days. Sheesh.
It seemed the tru-oil helped to keep the dye from migrating in the first test piece unlike the second un-oiled test piece. Now this seemed to work just ok but I was only dealing with an inch and a half or so piece. I’m not sure how well this method would work with two full fretboards without risking a screw up.
The other thing is it doesnt solve the problem of the ebony dust migrating and fouling the maple during the final finish. Seeing these results I’m afraid to move forward with that method. I did by some ebony binding and that would pretty much solve all these problems, but thats not really what I want. I want ebony with maple binding.
i have used the stuff from larry for binding before – i saved offcuts from a birdseye maple fretboard
it was used on this and i had no issues keeping it clean
It is too late into the process to change tack now, however adding a buffer strip of black binding (0.5mm – 1.0mm) would have allowed you a lot more room for error in dyeing the Ebony. It is nigh on invisible next to dyed Ebony as well:
Before:
After:
Heres a little bit of progress though. I thinned out the back of my headstock. I was going to use a safety planer for this but this was out and it seemed much quicker.
With that done I tried my hand at cutting out some simple shapes in mother of pearl.
Practicing on some scrap.
And the results. My first inlay ever. Its a boomerang. I’ve decided to do this as fret markers on the Aussie themed guitar. It just seems it would tie it in better. I thought this was going to be much harder than it was.
With the first test done I went about cutting the 12th fret inlay which was a little more delicate.
I didnt document the whole process but I cut out my initials and some very small stars for the Aussie southern cross and got them inlaid on the ebony headstock plate and got that glued up to the headstock.
Then tonight I trimmed up my truss rod access hole and trimmed up the edges on the router with a pattern bit.
I still have to finish cutting the fret markers and inlay the fretboard. Then I’ll be binding the headstock and fretboard and dealing with the maple binding and ebony dust issue.
It didnt cross my mind till you mentioned it. I might have to experiment with a truss cover made of smoked plexi or something. We’ll see.
I made a bending iron from some simple parts at home depot. I set up my router to cut some binding slots on the headstock but stopped short of cutting the channels because I needed to figure out how deep I wanted the binding to be around the edges so I could match the thickness of the fingerboard binding so I decided to finish the inlay so that I could radius and bind the fretboard.
I’ll sand and radius the board tomorrow and hopefully get them bound.
I’ve changed my mind on the binding. I think that maple on maple would look redundant and offer no contrast so I’ve decided on a darker wood. I’m going to use walnut on the fingerboard and body.
I was having a problem figuring out how to clamp the wood binding the the board so I made a jig that allows even pressure across the sides. It works well if it weren’t for some bone head mistakes. Fist off was I didnt use any wax paper between the wood and jig on the first one. The result was almost a disaster but I managed to tap it out without destroying it thank god. The second mistake was on the second board. I didnt seat the binding all the way flat and left a thin gap on the edge where the binding would meet the neck.
I ended up removing the binding from that side with a heat gun. I’m so glad I was able to save it. It could have been a costly lesson.
For the end piece I clamped the board to the bench and clamped another scrap piece of wood behind it at an angle. I used the wedge to add pressure to the binding. Simple but effective.
In retrospect I wish I would have mitered the end piece of binding. I have no idea why I didnt. It just didnt cross my mind till it was done. Chalk it up to being a “noob”.
I do think the darker binding will look much better though.
Few more pics.
Oh and I almost forgot. My neighbor gave me this awesome delta drill press for free last weekend.
I think I agree with you at this point. I was thinking about maybe doing a thin lam of ebony-walnut-ebony to use for the truss cover. Then again one of the mockups has a piece of maple stained to match the body that I like. We’ll see.
I did my first headstock binding Friday night and self schooled myself on wood bending. All in all it went pretty smoothly. At first I was trying to miter the binding while it was installed with an exacto. I got the idea from a video on youtube of some guy from the PRS custom shop who was doing it that way. It turns out it was much easier to pre-miter both sides of the binding before gluing it on. Live and learn.
I used surgical tubing to clamp the binding tight. Dont know if its the norm to use of not but it worked great and was really easy to work with.
I wish some of the miters were a little tighter but I’m happy with the end result.
Next up was to angle the body beyond the neck pickup to 3.24 degrees so it would match the angle of the neck. I want the fretboard to sit right up flush with the body kind of like a Les Paul.
Routing the headstock angle. This little angle finder gizmo is worth its weight in gold.
I’m pretty proud of how accurate this came out.
This came within less than a millimeter of where I planned for the string to meet the bridge.
With the frets installed and strings setup I think my bridge will only have to float maybe 2mm over the body.
I did have to do some very slight sanding on the back of the neck to just slightly change the neck angle. This is because when I drew up my plans I didnt take into account the fact that my finger board would be slightly thinner by the 22nd fret after radiusing. Lesson learned.
Its finally starting to look like a guitar.
I set up to drill my tuner holes by placing some wood behind the headstock to minimize any possible tear out and and drilled in from the top. On the third hole I tore out a chunk of ebony. I should have done just the opposite which I did, and the rest of the holes came out fine. I dont have pics but I fixed it by mixing some epoxy and ebony dust and filling the gap and sanded it flat with some 320 the next day. I can still see it but I think it should be fine once a tuner washer is over it and the headstock is clear coated and finished. I’m thankful it wasn’t worse.
Can you spot it?
I counter sunk for my neck ferrules. These can be a pain to remove. I use a decently powerful magnet and they come right out.
Installing the inserts. The first time I did this I used a spare bolt with some nuts to screw these in instead of a screwdriver. They went in pretty straight but not as straight as they could have been.
This time I used a 3″ bolt with the head cut off and some nuts and placed it into the chuck of my drill press so I could drive them in dead straight. I used a wrench to help torque it down. This was much easier and quicker and a lot more accurate.
The inserts are counter sunk about a mm under the surface.
And installed.
With the neck screws/bolts installed its time to glue on the fretboard.
I’m going with the drill bit indexing method again.
Maybe this wasnt the normal way but I used some violin clamps in conjunction with the squeeze clamps I have to clamp this all up. I want to make sure the edges dont have any gaps. I got a few gaps on my first build I had to fill. I didnt want it to happen again.
It occurred to me just before I glued this up that I forgot to kiss the fret slots with a file before I glued on the binding. I know you dont have to but I’ve read where it really helps to allow the frets to seat better.
I’m thinking I can still do it with the corner of a small block of wood with some 320 stuck to it. Its just going to be more time consuming.
Thats as far as it goes so far. I’m debating wether to fret it next or do the neck carve first then fret it. Does anyone have any advice on which some be done first? My first build I fret it before carving the neck.
Oh and if anyone has advice or a tutorial I haven’t seen here yet on carving the volute I’m all ears.
I decided I had to grain fill the walnut binding before I fretted. The only grain filler I have is called cristalac and the last time I used it was on a mahogany body and I was less than impressed with the results so I settled on using CA glue for the job. I started off by masking off the binding with vinyl automotive masking tape. From there I used med ca glue on a brush to fill the grain.
filling
I only filled the sides of the headstock binding because I’ll be lacquering the top of the headstock.
After everything was filled I ended up sanding the binding with 320 then 400 grits and finished with 0000 steel wool.
After all the work on this I ended up taking off a reasonable amount of the stain off the board so I ended up re-masking off the binding and re-dying the board black. (again)
The vinyl tape didnt let the CA glue bleed at all and I’m pleased with the result
I finally managed to get the frets on the first one. Doing this the traditional way is SO much easier. I have a newfound appreciation for the semi-hemi fret treatments now.
Before I started going all crazy with the files I wraped a shirt around the headstock to protect it from an errant file stokes or what have you.
I’m sure I do my beveling like pretty much everyone else here does but heres a tip that might help someone. I put s thin strip of tape along the bottom edge of my beveling file so that the file edge wont dig into the side of my neck. Sure, most of thats getting removed when I shape the back profile but you still have the sides where the neck pocket is.
Halfway there
Cant remember where I saw this but once the bevel is done I go over the edges with a fine sanding sponge to knock off the edges.
Standard procedure for most of you?
I still need to dress the corners but heres the results
And here is the 21st/22nd frets where I had to pull them. Twice for the 22nd. I’m not really happy about it but it is what it is.
And now that the frets are in here’s a quick mock up.
Slowly but surely coming along.
After I get the second one done fretted I think I’m going to set the bridge post holes, route for the pickups then think about the carve. I’m really looking forward to that part.
I finally got around to doing one of the top carves. Sadly I didnt take a whole lot of still pictures because I was really into what I was doing. But I did have my wife’s camera on a tripod filming a time lapse of the process. I’ll post it later when I get it edited together.
I’ll try and document the second carve a little better. I routed the edges of the body up to the tip of the horns with a 1.25″ cove bit. I wanted to carve the insides of the horns by hand.
I drew on some typographical lines to stair step the carve but I decided not to use templates. I just free handed the routes using the router sled I made. It went pretty smoothly and I was able to follow the lines drew within an 1/8″. Once that was done I started in with a curved ibex finger plane. Being my first time using one of these it took me a few minutes to get comfortable with it and get a good adjustment on the blade.
Certain parts of the body were much easier to plane than others. Towards the bottom of the carve the ibex plane cut through the maple like butter.
And on other parts I had to fight it to get it to work well and not tear out wood.
I was worried about how deep I routed this section in the beginning and started second guessing my decision to free hand route this but as I progressed it turned out not to be an issue.
I taped off the first 1/2″ around the neck pocket so I wouldn’t go too far on the insides of the horns.
I think the detail on the horns took the longest time and was the most challenging part.
And here it is finished and sanded up to 400 grit. This was a little more difficult then I was expecting but it was a lot of fun.
So now I had to fix it. Pulling the binding off would be messy so the logical thing would be to re-rout the channel and replace what I had just screwed up.
I didnt want to route the entire side off because it would make the miters off center on the horns and bottom edge of the body so I figured I could kind of feather the edges and basically scarf the replacement binding in.
Here is the result.
I just glued the replacement right over that.
then used a jewelers saw to trim the excess off.
Once everything was sanded flush it was almost indistinguishable with a little naptha applied.
I wanted some pickup covers to match the walnut binding on these. I could just order some of these but most places I’ve seen dont stock walnut and they dont come with a slant at the heights I want. That and they want like forty bucks a set. So heres how I went about it.
First I cut down a piece of 1/2″ walnut to the proper size on the table saw then set a 3 degree angle on my router sled so I could plane these down to the heights and angle I wanted.
There’s going to be a lot of waste on the thinner one but I wanted them to come from the same piece and match so oh well.
The Top Guitars Company 