I've been doing amateur woodworking off and on for several years now. Maybe later I'll write about some of the past projects I've done. But I started this blog to write about my latest project.
About a year and a half ago, I bought my first guitar. As I was learning to play, I kept looking at how the guitar was constructed and thinking "I wonder if I could build one." I searched the internet and found lots of videos on YouTube and lots of resources, so I decided to give it a go.
Since I've never built anything this complex before, I thought I better build two. The first one will just be a test build. I'll use the cheapest materials I can find just to practice the techniques and learn what not to do. Then I'll build another one with good materials once I (hopefully) know what I'm doing.
Finding cheap materials for the test build is turning out to be more of a challenge that I had anticipated. The only place I can find suitable woods for most of the parts are sites dedicated to luthiers (guitar builders). They all have great selections, but only of good wood. I'm not ready to test my skills on expensive wood just yet.
The top of a guitar is generally about 3mm thick (about 1/8") and is made of two pieces about 7" to 8" wide joined in the middle. The sides are usually about 4" to 5" wide and 32" long and also very thin as you have to bend them.
One of the local hardware stores caries a small selection of maple, mahogany and clear aspen pine. These come in shrink-wrapped boards of typical sizes for dimensional lumber (1x4, 1x6, etc). The aspen pine comes in pieces as thin as 1/4" by 5 1/2". I figure I can use three pieces instead of two and get away with using the narrower stock. After a little plaining (ok, a lot of plaining), I took the boards down to about 4mm. Not as thin as I'd like, but good enough for test purposes. In plaining the wood down, I learned a few lessons. The main one being that I don't want to have to do that for the final build. The second lesson is that I need a bigger plane. I've only got a couple of small planes which isn't really good for large surfaces.
For the sides I thought I could take some 1x6 mahogany and resaw it on the table saw by taking several passes, raising the blade a little bit each time until I got it as high as it would go and then flipping the board over and coming at it again from the other side. This turned out not to work so well. Even my 10" table saw only has a maximum blade height of about 1.5" above the table. I really need a band saw. But band saws large enough to resaw stock wide enough for the back and front of a guitar are more than I want to pay for a tool that I may only use for one project. So I may end up buying the wood for the back online.
