Building a Guitar
OK, not just a guitar but a
chambered, lightweight guitar. Building a completely solid
body guitar is really pretty easy. This is a bit more
complicated. When I first started making my own guitar
bodies from scratch I documented the process (exhaustively,
it's really long). I created an HTML version of that
documentation. In the six years since then I've upgraded and
added to my tools and changed many of my processes, however,
the original
documentation is helpful if you're short on tools. I
have a few, more expensive, tools that I use now. A Sculpfun
S10 laser with a blower and a Y-axis
extension, a Wen
13" spiral planer, and a Wen
oscillating drum sander. None of these tools is
essential but they make things go a lot faster. If I had to
have just one of them it would be the least expensive - the
drum sander. The price on the S10 laser has dropped like
crazy lately. At this time it's on sale for $269 (with the
blower). I spent quite a bit more for mine. The really good
thing about the S10 is that you can do some crazy detailed
inlay work with it. Yeah, I know, it has no soul that way.
But, you can do things with the laser that would be darn
near impossible by hand. For example:
Trying to cut those letters by hand would drive you nuts. That 12th fret inlay has almost 30 different pieces of wood in it. So, the thing about the laser is - do you want to spend more time making and installing inlays than you do building the entire guitar? Or, possibly - do you want to do dot markers instead of something cool?
Trying to cut those letters by hand would drive you nuts. That 12th fret inlay has almost 30 different pieces of wood in it. So, the thing about the laser is - do you want to spend more time making and installing inlays than you do building the entire guitar? Or, possibly - do you want to do dot markers instead of something cool?