Building your own guitar

Hi all - in the past week I've discovered another very good source for native timbers. Between Cahir and Clonmel there is a signposted cul-de-sac leading to a Co Council recycling depot called Legaun. Right at the entrance to the depot is a sawmill. The guy there is more than obliging, and he has beech, oak, yew, sycamore, chestnut etc - well worth a visit if you're after something. He has the biggest bandsaw I've ever seen, so if you want a plank resawn to get a bookmatched grain etc he can do that easily.

JC

(while you wait for an informed opinion to come along...)
Sycamore should work for a neck - "european sycamore" is similar to american Maple as far as I know, though I should stress that I have no practical experience, I just googled it when Nialldabass or JCJCJCJCJCJCJCJCJC mentioned it earlier in this thread as I was starting to catch the "Make Your Own Tele" fever. (which, if you don't treat it will never quite go away but it does die down enough that you can live a perfectly fulfilling life!)

Depending on what you read it's the same family if not the same tree as Maple, but when looking up luthier sites there was a lot of confusion as to which Sycamore they were talking about. The one you'd want is Acer Pseudo-something... the Acer bit denoting that it's Maple family. Some of the other trees that also get called Sycamore in different parts of the world are softer woods.

Given that it's a bass neck though, would you need to make a laminate neck with a harder wood? Oak or Chestnut, Cherry maybe? I seem to recall reading that iron compounds turn oak and chestnut blue though, might make for some interesting seams Irishwoods.com list all of the above so local sources are available.

Finished this tele today -





Sycamore body, ash neck, oak fingerboard - all Irish woods. LP-style pickup switch, strat-style arm relief and belly cuts. Danish oil on the body and fingerboard, Lidl lacquer on the neck. GFS/Axesrus hardware, hand-made brass nut.

Has this thread become moribund?

Great to get a response here. Why not post a few pics of that Explorer project?

JC

slavetothegrind wrote: »

lovely job on that tele!

Particularly like the dot inlays on the fretboard

if only i had the hands!!!!!!!

Thanks. the dots are actually dead-easy to do, you should have a go - it's just an adaption of a standard process used in conventional woodwork and cabinetmaking to hide screws. You use a tool called a plug cutter to make round plugs. In this case they are 10mm but in future I'll make them smaller, because 10mm is too big for the very uppermost frets. You drill a 10mm hole, bang in the plug with some glue, cut and sand it flush and you're done. In normal woodwork you'd use the same wood and align the grain so that the location of the screw in the hole is hidden, or at least well camouflaged. Here, you'd go for contrasting woods.
I have another fingerboard recently made with spalted sycamore dots set into cherry that looks good so far. Here is a pic:



One of the dots at the 12th hasn't enough contrast to be seen properly, I might try a spot of bleach or something on it to try to resolve that. That neck is larch, from a tree I cut myself, with a cherry fingerboard made from flooring left-overs. I have put water-based Danish oil on the fingerboard and Lidl's finest lacquer on the neck. I'm getting a great finish with the Lidl lacquer but it takes nearly a whole can to do a neck.
On the plugs, again to date I've been setting them in a blind hole. In future, I think I'll try drilling right through the fingerboard and smoothing the plugs off top and bottom for a more solid result ultimately. I must find a smaller plug cutter, maybe around 7mm.
You might also be interested to know that fret slots can be cut with complete success with a hand saw you can get in Woodies DIY for about 8 Euros, and a home-made mitre box, even though - for the purists - strictly speaking these aren't mitres. It's called a sabre-tooth saw, they do two sizes in Woodies, you want the small one. The alternative is an American saw by mail order for nearly 100 dollars plus customs if you're unlucky. I'm working on developing a process to cut them on a bandsaw, per several clips you can find on youtube like this:

http://youtu.be/wz7mfvTbpKg

It's actually not a simple straightforward matter - the thin-kerf blade is made in one popular American size only. I'm in touch with a British saw supplier who is interested in this, and he's sourcing thin-kerf band. When he has it, he'll make up a trial blade for my saw (Metabo 317BAS) and we'll see how it goes then.

light day in work so I was able to get some sorting out done on Glen's explorer.

still a load of setup to do and the backplate still needs made, but here it is so far

not bad for a 14 year old!!

one piece mahogany body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard and all the hardware from Guitarfetish.



this is his second build. when he was 12 he made a Les Paul......

same block of mahogany for body & neck, ebony fretboard and again, hardware from Guitar fetish

@martinedwards - they are two very nice guitars, incredible for a lad so young, he must have great aptitude. How heavy is the mahogany LP? I have a few chunks of mahogany and teak lying around that were salvaged from a skip on its way into a pallet grinder. I've roughed out one tele blank from mahogany but the weight is fearsome, so I've hollowed it out, I'm loosely planning to put a cap of some other wood on it. I also have a stripey project in the very early stages, with mahogany and spanish chestnut involved.
Fanned frets? I'm in awe. I haven't intentionally done any fanned frets. I'll persevere trying to make decent playable ordinary guitars for another while anyway.
Which method of radiussing the fingerboards are you using? I've made a Bill Scheltema jig, with a few mnor mods. I have made the sleds for a 12" radius and a 9", and for now I prefer the 9". I find it's best to start with an over-long blank, and allow about 2" of waste at each end where the router chews the wood a bit - in between is acceptable good.
@nialldabass - thanks for the vote of confidence! I build too slowly for the tdpri challenge. The yanks on there are a helpful bunch, some of them make fantastic guitars. One of my favs was a builder called Ironwolf who made a matched tele and strat from mahogany a few years ago, they were fabulous. If he did a p-bass and a mandocaster as well he'd qualify for sainthood.
The wood is out there once you start making a few contacts. The lengths we want are too short for most other woodworkers. I travel about a bit for work, and I call to every sawmill I pass. You'd be surprised what guys can pull out if you're after a short plank of something interesting. I'm expecting to pick up some holly in Cork at the weekend. I got some yew lately, I made a fabulous neck from it, look at the grain on this:



Is there any Moderator on this thread who could set the pictures to autosize themselves?

JC

nialldabass wrote: »

Yew is somthing else I've thought about, your like some mad guitar scientist, love it:D, Have you thought about a sycamore fretboard? nice close grain, maybe not as tough as maple but i bet it would hold frets nicely. You seem to have plenty of sycamore. My only complaint about your build is I can't see that lovely grain you had at the start, keep the next one natural lol

You (yew) don't know the half of it. All you see is what's going on in my shed - you should hear what's going on in my head!
12-string tele with on-board chorus circuitry...
Low-relief carved themed tele...
Telezouki...
Monkey-puzzle tele...
baritone tele...
LED position markers...
something with a midi signal generator...


I have too much bloody sycamore. I bought a big plank of it from Lisnavagh in Carlow, it was the first chunk I found that was thick enough. I now have slabs of ash, marcocarpa, mahogany, teak, spanish chestnut, beech and a few other odds and ends accumulated. I also have lots of cherry for fingerboards - a box of unused flooring in 1-metre lengths is the source of that, I get three fingerboards from each length and I might get even more yet if I resaw it more carefully and reduce waste.

I've pm-d the mod to ask for picture auto-sizing and got an instant NO to that idea ;-( Tdpri can do it, but not boards.ie it seems.

JC

Ah! but I don't think the mods here are obsessed enough to be bothered, not like the mad guitar builders, you have to be a little crazy, And I have the same problem, too many ideas in my head.
I have "wood stash envy":D

nialldabass wrote: »

Lol, I have JC's problem just keeping them straight

When they tell me there's something wrong with my guitars they're usually right ;-) By God, do you learn from your mistakes.

You'd be surprised how quickly the wood stash accumulates, because we need and can use bits that are useless to anybody else. I'd use pieces that a pro would probably dump, because I don't mind the time it takes to plane, thickness and resaw them. I even have some USED Canadian white maple maple flooring, with irreversible nails shot into it with air, and I get bits for my router jigs and so on from that.
The wood stashing isn't too bad - it's the tool bug you have to watch out for. In the past two years or so, I've acquired... a planer-thicknesser, two bandsaws, a hitachi table saw, a dewalt chop saw, a fretsaw, a pillar drill, a lathe and a few other gizmos, let alone the handtools. And I was armed to the teeth to begin with. Most of those toys came for low money or no money, but the floorspace they use is considerable, no hope of getting a car into my shed now and I used to have three in there including an s-class mercedes which is quite a big motor.

JC

nialldabass wrote: »

lol, I'm glad my space is limited to a shed, I'd love a thicknesser and a pillar drill and a ross and a new band saw big enough to resaw 8", I now have tool eny aswell thanks a bunch.

You don't need 8" to make half a guitar, 6 and a bit is enough. Price rises sharply with spec in those things, same for planers. I Either go for one that can do half a guitar, or a whole guitar, in-between is bad value. I have recently acquired a Metabo BAS317 precision bandsaw that just manages to resaw half a top with a little extra for lattitude. A ROSS is definitely on my wish-list and a dust collector - I should have bought that first. I'm presently managing badly with a Lidl ash bucket connected to an old domestic vacuum cleaner. Oh, I forgot the might Jedi Knight itself - I have a de Walt Radial Arm monster saw that sits lurking at me all day - I'm afraid of it - I've used it once for guitar-making, to cut a nut-slot which it didn't do very well because it doesn't leave a clean-bottomed trench. I've since made a tiny mod to my truss-rod-slot jig that lets me do nut slots with the router with greater control and clean trenches, you can see most of it on the yew headstock pic. Same simple jig does headstock thinning very well too, and I'm hoping it will also do the transition, with a bowl-cutting router bit..

there's no end to it.

nialldabass wrote: »

Hey! I've seen someone somewhere using a radial arm saw for fret slots, with the blade from stewmac and some sort of measuring jig, but I'm even scared of my router, the band saw I can handle that takes alot of pushing to loose a finger lol. Your right about the rest of the stuff though, no point having a thicknesser for 14 inch boards if the only timber you can get is 12" at best, And I like the little clamps you made for your router jig, very clever

yes, J Wells on tdpri does it but he's about the only one. That blade is a special thin-kerf one specially made by stew-mac and it's expensive - grand if you're making on a near-commercial scale and if your RA saw is good to 1/100th of an inch, provided of course that you have a RA saw to begin with, they're not cheap and they're definitely not common on this side of the Atlantic. You'd buy a lot of Woodies saws and a lot of bandsaw blades for what that one blade costs. It can also be used on a tablesaw which might be even more attractive.
You'll find that wide boards do turn up if you are talking to guys who harvest direct from native timber. I have loads of timber wider than 14 inches. Thicknessing a board that wide in one go would need a huge motor on the machine - easier to do that on a big drum sander. There's a joinery near where I live and they have a 48" drum sander that can be controlled to 0.1 of a millimetre - it's a phenomenal machine, and they are most obliging. They've smoothed wide boards for me now and again for beer-money. I recently got the knives of my planer-thicknesser resharpened by Galway Saws, it makes a big difference. Even when planing 2 mm off of a full-width mahogany plank, it just hums - no load on the motor the knives are so sharp.

That is gorgeous work, I'm nowhere near that standard. I used to play mandolin, can still knock a tune out of one. I had a lovely tear-drop shaped one years ago, it was stolen from my car in Limerick. Could you explain how you do the binding strips? I'd like to be able to make my own and install them.

JC

Just got the results of the TDPRI CHALLENGE, I came joint 28th with this build although there was about 50 ahead of me lol, but it was great fun doing it and I hope enter next year aswell
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Thanks man, now if they had a "tele that looks most like yer grannies sideboard" competition I might of stood a better chance:D

Well I'd say to the purists that the three aside tuners were one of the first tele designs known as the snakehead, but mine also has a 13% angle and made from sapele, so that might put them off even more.:P