Les Paul Jr style guitars, from scratch

AndrewDoesHair

Been Around the Block
I've been building guitars for about 4 years now. I don't remember why I started, I was just consumed with the desire to build guitars, and since it wasn't a desire to do crack or cheat on my wife, I indulged. Each guitar I'd build earned me a little cash to buy a nicer tool to make a nicer guitar. Now I have a pretty neat workshop and a huge inventory of high quality woods and paints (I prefer nitrocellulose lacquers). I'm getting ready to build a nice paint booth, which will be useful in my recent interest in working on motorbikes. but anyways, these were a recent couple of builds, which are actually not quite done as of now, but the process so far has been pretty well documented in pictures, so I'll just chat about it for a minute here.

The wood I used for these bodies is swamp ash, which is typically used on Fender style guitars. The wood grows in both very heavy and very light weights, the species varies greatly. And while the heavier stuff is fine for tables and chairs, the lightweight stuff is very much desirable for guitars. So desirable, that a few of the giant corporations (Fender, included) will go buy up all of the lightweight ash that is harvested, leaving only heavy stuff to be picked up in hardwood stores. I really lucked out last year, and found a guitar maker going out of business, so I brought him all my cash and scooped up whatever I could from his shop, including enough VERY light swamp ash to make about 35 guitars. So while these Gibson style bodies would traditionally use mahogany, I will be using Fender woods- swamp ash. Pieces wide enough to make a guitar are very rare, so it is not uncommon to join multiple pieces, in this way, for guitars. some argue that it makes the guitar stronger, and more rigid. Some argue that it won't sound as good as a single piece. I don't worry about it either way, it's what I can do... the edges are cleaned up on a jointer, and they're glued up with Titebond, which dries harder and stronger than the wood itself.
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Guitars are made using templates, and templates can come from a few places. I have had great success with template sets from Paul Rhoney, at Ponoko.com, but for this style of guitar I will be fabricating my own templates. And since I am fabricating my own, I'm taking the liberty to slightly alter a few dimensions. I mean, if it's 100% from scratch and fully custom, I'd rather it NOT be exactly like 'the real deal.' I start with blueprints like these, scaled up and printed full size.
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I use adhesive spray to lay the blueprint onto 1/4" thick MDF board, then I band saw and sand it to shape. I use the thin MDF board, double sided taped to a 3/4" MDF board, to make a sturdy working template for the guitar, and I store the master templates away. My goal with this template set was to make multiple scale lengths (the length of the strings, between the bridge, and the nut) while using the same body template. The fret lines are very very precisely placed, so precisely that their exact location is a theoretical spot in space that can't be measured exactly (sort of like when 3.33333333333333 will have an infinite number of 3's at the end) and even the finest guitars have thousandths of an inch of imperfection. The difference is so minor that we can't even hear it. Bu that's all just a side note. The position of these fret lines is dictated by the position of the bridge. The 12th fret is placed exactly half way between the bridge and nut, and the number of frets overall can dictate the length of the scale. A shorter scale sounds more snappy and tight, it has more attack at the front end of the note. A longer scale has a deeper timbre, and can be tuned to lower notes without getting rattly. What I've done with these templates is place the bridge where I wanted it on the body, and made 3 sets of neck templates, which are identical running down the neck, until you get to the end, where one neck places a nut at the 20th fret from the body (24" scale), one places the nut 21 frets from the body (25.5" scale) and one is 23 frets from the body (28.625" scale). A Gibson, like this guitar is modeled aesthetically after, has 22 frets and a 24.75" scale. Fender had two popular scales, a 24" scale and a 25.5" scale. The third scale I've used, 28.625") is for a baritone tuning (down 5 steps, B to B). To make these templates I used a lot of rulers, squares, and a good sharp pencil. After they were drawn up on the thin MDF, I cut and trimmed them, then copied them to thicker, working templates.
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As soon as the templates are done, I cut the fret lines onto the boards. One guitar will be 24" with a rosewood board, and one will be 25.5" with a maple board. I use a laser cut template, double sided taped to the fretboard, to align the fretboards on the table saw. The notches are spaced out to (as humanly possible to) perfection, and a pin on the table saw sled sits in each notch. The saw blade I use here cost more than the saw itself. It's very fine and thin, super precise. Guys measure these frets down to the 1000th. I just buy my fret wire from the seller of the saw blade, and I don't worry about it.
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Hang on... There's a lot more...
 
This is a template I use to shape the fretboard to match the neck. I just lop it off at the proper fret to achieve my desired scale length.
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The boards are rough cut on the band saw.
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and flush trimmed to the template, using the router table.
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That blank I glued up in the OP is planed down using a giant flat router bit in router on a jig I made, using two flat pipes and a flat sled. It takes shallow passes over the blank to take it down to my desired thickness (I think I did 1.5" for these builds). The template is then traced onto the blank (shown here)
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The body is rough cut on the band saw
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The grain in the wood moves (for the most part) front to back, so some cuts would be made with the bit, which only turns one way, spinning to pull away from the grain, and some cuts would end up pushing into the grain. This is bad, pushing into the grain will spilt the wood, or can grab the body and throw it across the room (pulling your fingers into the bit and turning your hand into soup). So what we do is screw the template into the body, then use a bearing on the top of the bit to ride the template and do half of the cuts, all moving "downhill"
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Then we keep the body and template in the exact same spot, and flip the entire known universe upside down, then adjust the bit to use a bearing on the opposite end, so that the uphill cuts are now downhill.
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Next I make an awful mess with my hand router and a 1/2" and/or 3/8" bit. I usually wear a dust mask, but I was out this day, and didn't want to make the drive to home depot (I regretted it when I vlew my nose in the shower that night and had bloody sawdust spray out).
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Various templates for various jobs. Double sided carpet tape is great for holding them in place.
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For the neck, I did some creative planing to the template. It has a 3 degree angle to it, so that the neck pocket tilts back, which will add more downward pressure on the strings over the nut and bridge. See the angle there? This one is aligned using screws that match the screw holes for the pickguard...
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Here are the completed bodies.
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And here they are with neck templates pretending to be necks...
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These necks will have an angle where the nut is, so I use two different templates to make each one. Because the shorter scales will end up wider (being that I used the same fretboard template for all of them) I had to make wider headstock templates for them, as well. These templates were made the same as the first ones, shaped on thin MDF, then copied to thick MDF.
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These necks will be angled using a scarf joint, which looks like this
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One piece necks are more brittle, and as a result this is a very common break for Gibson guitars
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I've made this jig to cut an angle into my stock, using the band saw.
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The angle is then cleaned up using a jack plane. This is my favorite tool; it totally makes you feel manly to use it.
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The angle is flipped around and glued on the back side of the rest of the neck blank.
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The result was a little bit crooked, so I flattened it out with that plane, again.
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A guitar has a lot of pressure pulling the neck forward (I think I read that it's around 500lbs of pressure) and so with climate changes and time, the neck will eventually give in to this and bend forward. It's only wood. So what they do to fix this is add a truss rod. It's a rolled steel rod bent over a curved channel and anchored at each end. One anchor is threaded, and when needed it can be tightened to make the rod straighten out over the curved channel, which ends up bending the neck backward to allow the rod to straighten (let me see if I can google an image to show this concept)

Ah, here we go. When this metal rod is tightened, it will want to be straight, and the only way it can get there is to push the neck backwards, as shown in this drawing.
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So I make a jig shaped like this curved channel, and I drive my router down the rails of this jig.
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I make the anchor from a flat piece of steal, drilled and threaded, then pounded to lock it up after it's threaded onto my rolled steel rod. The wood is drilled out then cleaned up with a chisel, here.
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The other end of the rod is put through a hole near the headstock (not drilled yet, here)
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But before it's installed in there, I cut out the neck and flush trim it.
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On one of these necks, I made a veneer to match the body, from some swamp ash.
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It was planed flat after gluing it onto the neck blank
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That's about as far as I've gotten so far... I haven't been doing much work on them since I got this...
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I'll update this when I complete the guitars.
 
Looks good man!
I've always wanted to do guitars.

The only thing I'd say is be careful with the nitrocellulose lacquer, it looks great going on but a few years and it will yellow and on dark wood you'll never notice it but in that light ash it may be noticeable.
Try a CAB-acrylic lacquer, as its water white an stays that way (clear)
 
SONICJK said:
Looks good man!
I've always wanted to do guitars.

The only thing I'd say is be careful with the nitrocellulose lacquer, it looks great going on but a few years and it will yellow and on dark wood you'll never notice it but in that light ash it may be noticeable.
Try a CAB-acrylic lacquer, as its water white an stays that way (clear)

Thanks. I hope my response here doesn't come off as presumptuous about your background, and whether you're a guitarist or not. In the guitar world we admire this yellowing, and often tint our lacquer to fake it. If a guitar yellows, it shows that it's been finished in nitro, and many guitarists believe that because nitro is thinner and harder than most polyurethane, acrylic, or polyester, that it will allow the guitar to resonate more. Here is a guitar that I purposely yellowed and dinged, because the buyer wanted the look...
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And these are some guitars that I built as gifts for my groomsmen- all of which have faux aging (called a relic, in the guitar world)
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and here are a few random images of more guitars I've made
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Gotcha,
I'm a furniture maker by trade, so the yellowing is a bad thing to me! Interesting that its desirable in the guitar world.
You make some beautiful stuff man.
My latest with cab, I don't want any yellow over these colors!
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Haha that it is.
More specifically poplar that's absorbed some cobalt nickel manganese and sulfur in its life.
 
Also, message me if you ever want to make a guitar, I can send you some templates. I have all sorts...
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Oh yeah, here's a progress pic of that first yellowed guitar... The tan lines won't even be seen when it's assembled, but people like that detail that you can't even see (just like on our bikes!)
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I am impressed and envious. I've got horrible woodworking skills, so this past year I've modded my Tele and built an electric cigar box guitar. Wish I could do what you've done, but will look forward to soon assembling a Partscaster.

Nice work!
 
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