Step lively, lads.

I am having a blast in the guitar building lab. The axis that it turns on seems to have shifted. A reversal of polarity perhaps. All of my mates at school have demonstrated aptitudes. We are each good at some things naturally. Other things take some work, or a lot. It's different for everyone. We have all had crushing days. And we all sometimes just get lucky. Whatever doubts we've had or difficulties have come, we are all now, obviously, in our element. Since our progress past the halfway point of the program, we have started using what we've learned to make guitars from scratch. Just like that. And how we advance. Five working days ago, all we had were some ideas and our kits, chock full of esoteric gems. We are already one third through the build time which is 14 days total. It's pretty easy to see now that we aren't making canoes. The pace will remain very quick. I plan to update accordingly, hopefully after every two building days if I don't give out. Mmmh. So, continuing on from the blueprint stage, we prepare our wood to be squared, sized and joined. Some have asked me if we are, like, putting kits together and stuff. Here is a succinct answer to that question.




All of the wood doesn't come to us this rough. I haven't seen any with leaves or birds nests, but having a bit of bark is not unusual. There is quite a lot of mechanical Tomfoolery and hand-work involved in doing this work properly. Plenty of glue-and-clamps operations too.




We use templates. They help us to achieve accuracy and maintain consistency. Mine is based on the iconic Fender Telecaster, with various slight mods to suit my tastes. Perfect the shape, transfer it to some sort of flat, stable and durable material, trace with a pencil and then string it up! Ok, it's not that easy but that is sorta what happens. On the left, the template, the mother. On the right, her first born. This is the same piece of wood from the previous picture, followed by a close-up. The wood is 1.5 inches thick.







Wooooo! It feels great to pick up a 3-D rendering of this dream. A very satisfying, tangible bit of evidence of the effort so far. Next up, I'll glue that book-matched flamed maple stock together for my drop top, and I'll cut fret slots into my fingerboard.

See you next week.