Latest woodworking project, my first electric guitar

5-5-2021

One of my other, more recent hobbies is woodworking. There is something about using dangerous machinery to destroy and reshape the dried up corpses of the things which cause me allergies ever year which I find a little therapeutic. Even in their death I still have to be careful as I am allergic to both pollens and wood dust. Not sure who gets the last laugh.

I was chatting with a buddy of mine on the East Coast about our hobbies a few months ago. He's a big guitar guy so naturally at some point the question of could I build an electric guitar came up. I basically know nothing about guitars I enlisted my friend's help and guidance and set off on building my first guitar.

The design will be based on the Explorer style of guitars, with many planned artistic liberties taken, such as using a neck not traditionally used for explorers. One picture shows my wood choice for the body, Walnut in brown, Maple in White, and Purple Heart in purple. I also marked a special length I needed to pay attention to in order to keep the frets on the neck at a proper musical spacing. I technically got the right part of the red marker wrong but like I said, I don’t know much about guitars. That’s where my friend come in to double check my plan! The other image is a rough sketch of the shape of the body, referencing the neck I will be using, and also laying out where the knobs and switches will be. After some feedback from my friend we both agreed the neck needs more body to grab on to so I plan on enlarging that little bump in the lower right hand corner of the body.

I will start cutting and gluing up the wood for the body. I will do my best to record the process. For as much as I love taking pictures I tend to be terrible as recording all of the steps while I woodwork. I blame the dirty hands.