Nomad's First Scratch Build

Nomad

After doing some tidying up in my workshop, I started my first build from scratch over the xmas and new year holiday. The plan is a symmetrical doublecut with a maple cap, set neck, 22 frets, Gibson scale, 3-a-side machine heads and two humbuckers. Controls have still to be finalised.

Here are some pics of things so far.

Two identical body templates...

http://imgur.com/iL0J1Re.jpg

These actually started out being for a tele kit guitar that I was going to make into a doublecut, but I managed to make a mess of the body of that with a router when I tried to skim 5-6mm off the top so that I could put a cap on it. Rather than try to rescue it, I abandoned that plan (don't like Fender scale anyway...) and decided to do a scratch build instead. The horns were originally shaped like the lower one on a tele, but I changed the shape to the above, and the overall outline was tweaked in places as well (mainly, slimmer at the waist). When I work out what cavities need to be in which template, I'll add those.

Laminated neck blank...

http://imgur.com/WHdeO2N.jpg

This has a 20mm wide strip of flame maple down the middle, with dark red meranti either side. The maple is quarter sawn, and the meranti has the grain curving in from the top (roughly aligned with the diagonal, so nearly on the quarter). Overall dims are 58mm wide, 44mm deep and about 710mm long.

Two halves of the top...

http://imgur.com/CSWfLmt.jpg

Not the greatest flame maple in the world, but should be fine for what is essentially a practice build. It's about 12mm thick, which was what I got after resawing the lump by hand a few months ago (took ages!) and running it through the thicknesser. The body outline here is a sketch which was done before the templates were finalised.

Body...

The main body wood is elm, because that's what I had lying around. The two halves bookmatch quite well even though they're from a 40mm-ish thick plank that was cut across the middle.

Jointed, glued and clamped...

http://imgur.com/5Bvhmj8.jpg

Then flattened and the outline drawn on...

http://imgur.com/SQzKxRf.jpg

And cut out on the bandsaw...

http://imgur.com/EE5YFDJ.jpg

I finally got some Tuffsaws blades to try, and I'm impressed. For this, I used a 6mm wide 4tpi premium jobbie, and my 10" Axminster Hobby range saw went through it no problem. At this stage, the body weighs 2.4kg, or 5.3lbs.

Here's a shot of the bits laid out to get an idea of where things are...

http://imgur.com/hmXMild.jpg

The fingerboard is ebony, and the ruler indicates where the board will end. The neck blank extends to pretty much where the board currently ends, and I'm wondering if a neck tenon is worth trying. I haven't thought through the assembly sequence for that yet, so not sure.

I'm currently marking things on the neck, like nut and fret positions, sketching out the side profile, etc. I think I now need to order some fret wire, a truss rod, bridge, and other bits of hardware.

Roland

Always a nice way to start the year.

BigMonka

Ooooh this looks like it's going to be a really interesting thread - a great looking first build.
I'm wondering about trying a first build from scratch later this year so I'll be making lots of notes about your build!

Nomad

Well, I'm a noob, so don't take too much of what I do as guidance (but I do hope it works out).

If you haven't already, it's worthwhile watching some of the Crimson Guitars build series, like the very long and detailed Clarity custom build from claro walnut. He's also done a couple of more recent time-limited challenges where he attempts to build a guitar non-stop in 12 hours and 9 hours. One thing about these builds is that he does the carving (very skillfully) using an angle grinder with heavy abrasives. However, he also has a tutorial on carving a top by hand using gouges, thumb planes, etc.

This build I'm doing is a distillation of everything I've absorbed up to now, from the various builds here, the Crimson videos, some other videos, and general web reading.

Marktigere1

Yes I use the 'Angle Grinder' carving method for body and neck.

Its a very subtle tool if your careful or it can reduce your efforts to sawdust in one slip.

I'm sure you know this and sorry if teaching to suck eggs etc, but get a decent dust mask not a local DIY job when using angle grinder method or indeed sanding hard wood.

P3 dust filtration is recommended for hard wood fine dust particles.  I use one of these http://www.thesafetysupplycompany.co.uk/p/9072160/sundstrom---sr100-adjustable-silicone-half-mask---smallmedium---conforms-to-en1401998---am-l10022a-sm.html with the P3 filter.

Ta

TheOtherDennis

I'd like to say something nice about that, but only two of the pics work. What I can see of it is definitely looking good, but for some reason I'm having trouble seeing pics lately... :-S

Rabs

Cool...  Double cuts rock!!      Good luck with it I will follow with interest.

Nomad

Marktigere1 said:

Yes I use the 'Angle Grinder' carving method for body and neck.

Its a very subtle tool if your careful or it can reduce your efforts to sawdust in one slip.

Aye, I'm not planning on using that method. Aside from the fact that I don't have an angle grinder, I'd rather avoid yet more noise to bug the neighbours (in a flat), and I'm keen to try hand carving with gouges, planes, etc.

Marktigere1 said:

I'm sure you know this and sorry if teaching to suck eggs etc, but get a decent dust mask not a local DIY job when using angle grinder method or indeed sanding hard wood.

P3 dust filtration is recommended for hard wood fine dust particles.  

A very good point, actually. I've been using the basic white DIY ones, but haven't been very impressed with them, so I've been thinking of getting something better. Perused Screwfix this evening and got one of these...

http://www.screwfix.com/p/draeger-x-plore-3500-construction-half-mask-with-filters-p3/21509

Haven't used it yet, but covering up the holes with the filters off suggests it has a very good seal to the face.

Nomad

TheOtherDennis said:

I'd like to say something nice about that, but only two of the pics work. What I can see of it is definitely looking good, but for some reason I'm having trouble seeing pics lately... :-S

Don't know what would be causing that - all of the photos are in the same Imgur album.

Nomad

Been doing some fingerboard flattening with my home-brew levelling beams. Mostly using 60 grit for now, and I've got one side pretty flat...

http://imgur.com/9IfeL0t.jpg

I've also been gathering up ebony dust each time I stop to check for flatness (I don't normally have the little jar lying there - that's just for the photo). I sweep the stuff up into a pile using a dry 2.5" painter's brush (reserved for sweeping up dry crap), and then scoop it up with an artist's palette knife (actually a painting knife because it has a cranked handle and a very thin blade). The little jar and a similar knife can be had from Hobbycraft for not a lot of cash. The Range should have them as well.

http://imgur.com/avL2E4j.jpg

The little hexagonal jar is about 43mm across and 66mm high, and it's about 2/3rds full after working on one side of the board.

Roland

Nomad said:

Marktigere1 said:

Yes I use the 'Angle Grinder' carving method for body and neck.

Its a very subtle tool if your careful or it can reduce your efforts to sawdust in one slip.

Aye, I'm not planning on using that method. Aside from the fact that I don't have an angle grinder, I'd rather avoid yet more noise to bug the neighbours (in a flat), and I'm keen to try hand carving with gouges, planes, etc.

I've found a surform and cabinet scraper very useful for freeform carving belly and forearm contours. They also don't produce as much dust as a grinder would. However nothing beats a router if you are doing round edges like a Tele or Strat.

Nomad

Roland said:

I've found a surform and cabinet scraper very useful for freeform carving belly and forearm contours. They also don't produce as much dust as a grinder would. However nothing beats a router if you are doing round edges like a Tele or Strat.

The top will be carved LP-style. Not decided on a belly cut yet, although probably not - my Lemon Drop feels fine without it. Got plenty of rasps, scrapers and surforms if I do decide to do one. There will be a slight round-over on the back edge, but not as big as on a Strat.

Nomad

Back to the fun...

Some bits turned up, which included the truss rod, so I've done some more with the neck. The truss rod channel was routed using my home-brew small router table which was made to suit a Makita router/trimmer...

I squared the ends of the channel off with some small chisels, and then found that one end wasn't going in properly. Then I remembered that the adjustment nut is 7mm in diameter while the rod is 6.2mm wide and 9.1 high. That means that the channel needs to be a little wider at that end, and also a little deeper because the centre position of the nut is such that it sits out a bit from the general outline of the rod by about 0.5mm. So, this end of the channel was widened and deepened with chisels...

The narrow chisel was used bevel down to scrape out the bottom. With that done, the rod fits nicely...

I checked with the flat of a chisel on the top surface of the wood to make sure nothing was protruding.

Next step was to cut the front face of the headstock on the bandsaw and plane it smooth...

The big home-brew vice worked a treat. I slipped up a little here, during the planning. I reckon I did the cut on the bandsaw a bit to close to the 'correct' line, such that when I planed off the saw marks, I had cut into the flat area I was intending to leave for the nut (the truss rod stops at the fingerboard side of the nut). Not necessarily a problem, though. I think my options here are to either add a new flat area a little lower than the surface that the fingerboard will be glued to, or fit a headstock veneer with the end bevelled so that it's coplanar with the main surface of the neck, thus recreating the platform for the nut.

I had been thinking of not doing a veneer, but having cut the 10° angle, I think it's the better idea. The cut reveals the end grain in the meranti parts of the laminate, and I'd either need to duplicate that look with the wings, or put up with a different grain pattern on them. On balance, I'm leaning towards the veneer at the moment, for this aesthetic reason, and because this is supposed to be a practice build, meaning I should give it a try anyway. I'll have some geometry to work out regarding veneer thickness and the width of the bevel.

I decided to stop there for now and do a little bit of visualising to see where things are at...

I had cut the fingerboard down to slightly oversize earlier (after doing yet more sanding to flatten it yesterday), which has given me a couple of nice ebony offcuts to be used for something or other. I think at this point, it splits into have two things running in parallel - I can slot the board and start thinking about inlays, and I can start flattening the veneer to see what thickness I end up with while thinking about how to do the wings (I might add some maple veneer if the grain pattern on the wings is going to differ from the main bits of meranti).

A couple of things to note in that last picture: You can see how much the neck extends beyond the fingerboard. Not decided yet whether to trim it off, or to leave it there as a tenon. To the left of that, the scissors are sitting on a mitre box for the fret slotting saw. This is similar to the one I made for the lap steel build, but a bit better. 18mm birch ply base and a couple of bits of beech for the uprights. It seemed to work when I used it to trim off the nut end of the board, although it isn't perfectly square - there's about a 0.1mm gap at one end of the cut, and the cut is off vertical by about 1°. I don't think either of these will really matter in terms of intonation or seating the frets, but the precision mechanical designer in me knows they're there (which leaves me thinking that this will need to improve for the next build...).

Nomad

A bit more done...

I've been sanding the headstock veneer and I'm gradually approaching something flat. It looks like it will be a smidge under 2mm thick. With that thickness, once I cut a 10° chamfer to make the surface that the nut rests on, I can trim the sharp edge back until it's about 1mm thick, and this will leave a platform that will fit a 6mm thick nut (or various other adjustments if I want to change the nut dimensions a bit). The idea is to not try to make a thin feathered edge at the end of the veneer, but have a little bit of a flat that butts against the end of the fingerboard.

I also had a moment of realisation regarding possible grain disparity at the wings for the headstock - the wedge-shaped offcut that came off when I cut the 10° just happens to have the meranti end grain exposed along the cut face in the same way as on the headstock (well, the other side of the cut)...

So the face got planed smooth...

It's interesting to note that, in the shavings in the background, the maple maintains its structure far better than the meranti. Both are quarter sawn, but the meranti shavings are very friable in comparison.

Although there's not a lot of wood to be had in the wedge shape, there should be enough for the headstock shape I have in mind...

It only sticks out about 6mm on each side, and the length I need at full thickness is about 40mm. I can easily get two bits to fit out of the offcut.

Still musing on the final headstock shape a bit. I like the overall style of what I have, but might make it a bit longer to make more room for the logo.

Rabs

Cool... Well id say if you can find a better match for the wings it would be better BUT its only a small part of the headstock so I reckon it will be ok... How thick are those wings? Can you not just turn them on their side?

And I like the shape..   Much better to use that style (I think its called a snake head) where the tuners go inwards towards the top and thus giving you a straighter string path (unlike the crazy angles you get on a Gibson ) and hopefully avoiding the binding issues you can get on a Gibson nut.

Nomad

The wings will be cut from the bit that's in the vice. The surface at the top of that will be flush with the headstock surface under the paper template. Those two surfaces were either side of the saw cut that separated the two bits, so the end grain is intersecting the surface at the same angle on both. The plan is to cut some bits off the meranti on the wedge and glue them onto the neck blank. The wedge is about 30mm deep at the thick end, so no problem getting the full thickness of the headstock for the desired length (13-14mm given there will be an ebony veneer on the front).

I did look at the possibility of straight string pull, but I'm not into the asymmetric arrangement of the machine heads that comes with that (and 6-a-side was never in the running). Here's how the string angles look with the current version...

The tuners are the small button type usually used in 6-a-side setups, so the headstock is actually quite small (131mm long from the intonation side of the nut, and 70mm at the widest point). Alsough it's quite small, it's not all that different from the one on my red special, which also has small button tuners, and I manage fine with those.

Here's the overall design so far, with hardware, pickups and control positions still to be determined...

I'm making it a bit wider at the nut, at 45mm, to see if I can get along with this spacing.

Rabs

Yeah that's sort of how I do my headstocks too  and while not straight (even though they tend to vary a bit build to build)...  They are less of an extreme angle than Gibson... I think PRS do theirs totally straight...

Like this...  (and also notice the side wings on this headstock, different grain and I think it looks ok )  In the case of this one its actually slightly odd.. I have the bass strings straight and the other three at a slight angle)

http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r588/Rabs2010/RabsWood Web Pics/DSC01592_zpsolm3evzb.jpg

Nomad

I reckon a smallish angle should be okay, especially if the nut slots are faired a little to follow the line the string takes. So far as I can tell, binding happens when the string exits the headstock end of the slot, so softening the edges there a little should help.

Nomad

Glued the wings on...

The meranti parts of the wedge offcut were cut off, and the outer sides of those and the headstock smoothed a little using the Crimson fret levelling file, which did a pretty good job. One wedge was cut short so that I could clamp the other in place temporarily...

The pencil marks on the edges indicate the space that the wider part of the headstock will occupy. The stronger pencil mark at the back, near the clamp, indicates where the shorter wedge will end so that the clamp is sure to be out of the way when the wedge is fitted. I checked that the depth would be okay by projecting the lines down perpendicular to the angled surface and drawing in a box 15mm deep. The wedges cover that with some spare, so there should be no issue with thickness.

The second wedge is added...

The trick with the quick clamp made getting the two lined up a bit easier. especially when getting the first F-clamp on.

A third F-clamp is added and the quick clamp removed (not needed because there was no glue at that end)...

The grain match looks pretty good so far. It'll be easier to tell once the clamps are off and the surface skimmed with a plane.

In other news, I used a bit of the long narrow ebony offcut from the fingerboard to try fitting and polishing a (very short) fret. Went reasonably okay, but I need to be a bit gentler with the profiling files. The crimson fret rubbers worked pretty well (I have all four grades and worked from coarse to super fine, which got a pretty good polish. I'll try a couple more and see if I can get the shaping done better.

Rabs

Nomad said:

I reckon a smallish angle should be okay, especially if the nut slots are faired a little to follow the line the string takes. So far as I can tell, binding happens when the string exits the headstock end of the slot, so softening the edges there a little should help.

Yes totally...  A well cut nut with a rolling off the back of the nut and you should be fine..  And indeed ive never really had that issue on my own Gibsons but I have heard it far too many times on the forums about tuning issues and usually its the nut that's the problem.. (followed second by the truss rod needing a tweak).

Nomad

Well, there have been a couple of mid-stream horse changes. I'd been looking at the headstock and came to the conclusion that it's just a bit too cramped. After checking the sizes of the bits at the headstock, I made it 15mm longer, moved the logo up and separated the machines by a further 5mm. I also had a think about frets and scale length, and decided to make it 24-fret with a 24" scale. When I cut the board for the 22-fret Gibson scale, I had left a bit of extra length, and it turned out that that there was enough to make the change.

Here's the latest...

Took the clamps off the wings and gave the surface a few skims with a smoothing plane...

I'm happy with how the grain matches. Although this side will be covered, the other side will be cut parallel to this and will have a similar pattern. You can see the revised outline drawn on the surface to check that it will still fit.

I then clamped the fingerboard onto the neck and positioned the veneer...

Before doing this, I ran a block plane against the edge of the veneer that meets the fingerboard to put what will become a vertical face on it (while the main surface is tilted back 10°).

The two clamps on the left here are to act as an end stop for when I glue the veneer on...

They were jiggled around until the veneer was square to the fingerboard, such that when it's taken off, glued, and replaced with the fingerboard removed, the sides of the two clamps, in conjunction with centrelines at both ends,will result in the veneer landing in the same position.

This was duly done and a couple more clamps used to hold the veneer in place...

With that put to one side to dry, I turned my attention to slotting the fingerboard. Here's a shot of the slotting jig and the saw...

The mitre box is clamped to the bench, as is the lamp (the reason for this will become apparent). The saw has a strip of scrap wood stuck to it to act as a depth stop (trimmed in the bandsaw to give a slot about 2mm deep).

Those who followed my lap steel build last year may recall the trick with using a beam of light to help with aligning the marks on the board with the path of the saw. It works like this...

The lamp is positioned so that it shines through the nearer slot in the jig and the beam projects onto the far slot - note how the illuminated area is equal on both sides of the lower slot. To set up for the cut, you slide the board in until your mark is in the middle of the beam...

Then nip up the quick clamps to keep everything in place and cut away.

After a few cuts, it became clear that the fretting saw wasn't working very well. I didn't like the pull action for one thing, and it seemed to struggle to cut. So I pulled the blade out and reversed it, and then sharpened it. This entailed swapping the jig around so that the board was braced against the longer bit of wood. (The surface of this is more square to the cut than the shorter bit, and doing this means there is no chance of the lightweight clamps flexing.)

Each cut was a little draggy on the first few strokes, but rapid and easy once it got going (night and day compared to the earlier attempts).

And I now have a slotted fingerboard...

You can see how much was left after the 24th fret. This was after cutting about 1mm off to get rid of the rough cut end.