There has been no shortage of work on the Les Paul.  So now I feel I’m playing a bit of catch up with the blog.  I was able to have the garage door open in shop this weekend, so that was a nice treat.

I tapped into my growing stack of templates for cutting out the pickup cavities and the neck mortise.  But first I wanted to make sure that all the parts fit where they were supposed to and that I understood how each of the pieces related to the others.  Here’s a first look at what the key pieces will look like.

After playing around a bit with how much clearance the strings will need over the fretboard and to the bridge, I decided to take just a little bit of thickness off the deck where the bridge and tail-piece sit.  This is shown in the pencil marks below.

I used one of my mdf templates for the neck mortise.  It is secured to the body flush with the neck plane using a few nails in the area that will be covered by the fretboard.  There is a wood block sandwiched between the template and the body at the back end where the clamp is securing everything to the workbench.  I tried hogging out most of the wood in the neck mortise using my forstner bits, but they were having a difficult time with the hard maple.  Time to sharpen those bits!  I ended up making multiple passes with the router instead.

Here is the completed neck mortise.  The bottom of the mortise is parallel to the neck plane.  This means that I will not have to put the angle in the neck tenon.  Some folks do it the other way around, but this seemed to work well.

Next, another template was used to cut out the pickup cavities.  You can really see some of the maple figuring in this shot.  I’m still going back and forth on what colors to use for the top.  You can also see where the pickup cavity has intersected the wiring channel in the neck pickup.  It does the same thing on the bridge pickup in the corner that you can not see.  I used a final template to cut the little wings in the pickup cavity ends (no photos).  These wings (I don’t know what they are called) are for the mounting and adjustment screws on the ends of the pickups.  You can just make them out in the final photo.

Here’s a shot to show the final clearances.  I read on one of the blogs that you are targeting 15 to 15.5mm of clearance at the bridge location.  This is pretty close to that.