After a few weeks of working on the mostly-straight lines of the fretboard, it is nice to be finally working on some curves.  I’ve had the templates made for a couple of months and had the wood for about a month, so it was time to get going with the guitar body.

The main reason for not starting with the body was to allow time for the wood to stabilize to Montana’s low humidity.  The wood came from Gilmer Wood in Portland, Oregon.  Marc Culbertson is the instrument wood guy at Gilmer and he helped me with some decisions.  One of the nice things about Gilmer is that they put pictures of much of their inventory on the web site.  This way you can browse the available wood and choose the pieces that speak to you.  I ended up with a slip-matched maple top, mahogany body and neck, and a piece of holly for the headstock veneer.  They shipped promptly and the prices were in line with the other luthier wood sources.  I probably could have sourced most of the wood locally, but it would have taken a bit of digging and guess-work to get suitable wood.  And I would have ended up with a lot of leftover.  Ultimately, I decided to stick with a source that knew what they were doing.

I do not have access to a wide planer or sander, so I constructed a simple, wide planing jig using my router.  A rail on either side that is just taller than the thickness of the board I’m “planing,” and a spacer between the rail and the board, held in place with a pair of long clamps.  It’s not ideal, but it got the job done with good results.  The body is planed down to 1 3/4″ before cutting out the body shape.

Next , I attached the template to the body blank using double-sided tape and cut it out on the band saw.

Next stop, the router table to flush trim the body to match the template.  This took several passes with a couple of different bits in order to cut the entire depth of the body.  A long template cutting bit would be nice in the future.

The switch and electronics cavities, along with the wire channel are routed out next using templates.  The switch cavity is routed all the way through the body, while a thin veneer is left in the electronics cavity.  This veneer will be further shaped to approximately mirror the angle of the deck once it is carved.  The wire channel  provides a path for connecting the switch, pickups and tone/volume controls.

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