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My Dad has some large planks of walnut, they're about 1 13/16 thick by about 13" wide. I'd like to make a flat top body. I don't have the tools or experience to shape the body, much less, build a neck from scratch. So the neck will be purchased. I have a few questions:

1. I think the wood is thick enough and wide enough to allow me to make the body out of one solid piece. And then router a channel for a through-the-body neck. Thoughts?

2. What would be the best tool to cut out the shape?

3. My band tunes down a whole step from standard–D G C F A D. We play stoner metal. So I'm thinking a longer scale neck would be appropriate. Ideally I'd like a longer scale, somewhat wide fender style neck. Any recommendations?

4. Any recommendations for bridge hardware?

5.What newbie mistakes can I easily avoid?

Thanks in advance for your time. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.

-Clay

Hey Clay,
I built a guitar about 2" thick from solid Walnut with a Maple top.
The thing weighs a ton! Seriously, I have a groove in my shoulder from the guitar strap.
Don't forget about adding channels or holes in the body for the pickup wiring.
You could route channels on the top of the body and cover them with a pickguard, or glue a wood top on.

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I'd say growing the scale length will help you if you're down-tuning. A normal scale length, especially a shorter one like a les paul or an SG will get pretty floppy on you when you downtune. With a longer scale length you can tighten your strings more while still attaining the down-tune because there will be a longer string which will naturally play lower frequencies.

whether you can use that one piece all depends on what shape you want to make, it should be thick enough but you need to figure out what kind of neck joint you're going to use and if there's enough meat left to say, bolt on to.

You should plan on doing a lot of research before you cut anything, find what kind of tail-piece you're going to use, hardtail or tremolo. This will tell you if you want any neck angle.

Figure out your headstock shape, what kind of tuners you're going to use. Buy everything that you're going to use on the guitar before you start building so you can verify everything will fit together correctly. Draw out the whole thing, do a front view and a side view showing how all the hardware and all of the angles will fit together. It will save you a lot of heartache by doing all your planning up front.

Take your time and follow a plan, the last thing you want is to get halfway into a build and realize you've made a huge mistake and have to start over. If that happened, would you have the tenacity to start over or would you just give up on it?

Yes, as I was typing my questions i realized I need to do some readin'. So would you all fatten up the 1 5/8 (measured wrong the first time) thickness or leave it? Walnut is pretty dense so I don't know that amy more thickness is needed for sustain.

It's sounds like you wanted a bolt-on neck, but you also mentioned a neck-thru body.
I hope you realize these are two completely different methods of construction....

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no. I get that.

Welcome!

I've recorded lots of stoner metal and tune in that ballpark for fun on occasion. The reason most guys play the Les Paul is because it has a relatively short scale. The strings turn to mud at that tuning and that's part of the appeal. Matt Pike plays his Les Pauls (24.75) and First Act (25) tuned down to C and I guess most folks find no fault in it. I sure don't. The longer the scale, the more of a pianoesque "clang" (think Meshuggah) you're going to get. The technical Periphery-types are going for clarity and take Fender scales (25.5) and up to keep from getting soggy.
Even the EGCs that are taking foot in the greater stoner genre are 25.1. Lots of those guys are at least D tunings.

I've about 9 gorgeous walnuts bodies in the wings. Can't wait to see how they perform. Smells like a dusty barn when you cut it tho.

Hi, Clay.

From my perspective, I'd say:

1. Yes, you can get out a body shape from one piece of your stock. But with an ample supply, there's no reason to limit yourself to a single board width. You might think about this until after you've done some reading about joining, glueing, grain orientation, seasonal wood movement,etc.

2. Best tool is sort of up to you. Most efficient is probably a bandsaw, but you could even cut the shape with an inexpensive coping saw if it came down to that. Or a scroll saw, a jig saw, a bow saw. or a router with a pattern and a pattern bit. You could actually even do it with a hatchet and a couple of sharp whittling knives. I'm not kidding. But the best tool is the one you can buy or borrow or gain access to, and learn to use safely and properly.

3. I can't advise you on this question, but you'll get some good answers from others.

4. With bridge hardware, once again it depends on you and your overall concept. I think you should consider the guitar you are currently playing versus others you have played and think about your preferences. Then go to various suppliers like Stew Mac or AllParts and read their descriptions of the hardware. Then come back here and search the forum archives using search terms from those "catalog" descriptions. You'll find out what's involved in installing all the various types. Some bridge/tailpiece combinations will be more straightforward and easier to install than others. Some work better on certain body styles than others, but they all get the job done in different ways.

5. The biggest newbie mistake would be jumping in before doing your research. Look at a LOT of plans or develop your own plan. Seeing everything expressed full size on a plan in top, back, profile and section views will help you avoid a lot of mistakes. Even the most experienced, skillful builders here will tell you that they make mistakes, so plan on making them in spite of everything. The mark of a true craftsman is the ability to recover from his mistakes and fix them in a way that appears to be planned and/or invisible.
And this next piece of advice is very, VERY important: Tools can hurt you--sometimes seriously! Learn to use them properly, read all safety precautions until you understand them and then FOLLOW those safety practices. Even a seemingly benign tool like a screwdriver can really mess you up. I'm not kidding. Learn the safe way to use each tool.

With all that in mind, I recommend you find a source of instruction, such as a local woodworking club, a an adult education center with a wood shop, an experienced, willing friend who will teach you, etc. etc.

Good luck with it. It's an obsessive passion with almost everyone here, and everyone was in your shoes at first.

Patrick

Matt Pike is my hero. Love High on Fire.

We play metal but also use a lot of chords that go beyond root fifth or we build chords combining bass and guitar parts, so if anything is out of tune or the intonation is not great, things can start to start to sound sloppy and crappy. So even though we play that genre sort of, I still want the best intonation I can get. I know Matt Pike plays in C, how he manages to keep that 9 string guitar tuned and sounding good I'll never know. It would drive me crazy.

Thanks Koa,

i do have some woodworking experience. Last question-any book or website recommendations for a newbie git maker?

i really appreciate the help. I'll post pics...unless it ends up looking like hell : )

http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-home-depot/

The Tele Home depot subforum of the TDPRI. The contents of this forum represent several college courses on building electric guitars. Not just Teles. Any type of electric you could ever want to build has probably been built here, probably more than once. The sheer wealth of information is staggering. Better than any book or video you could ever purchase, IMHO.

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Mike

The only thing nescessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.

I could never do it right, but he's jamming 13-ga strings. Have you seen his bridge? It's a tune-o-matic style, and I believe he collapsed the radius from being a monster. http://vimeo.com/10473703 in this video it appears (about 1:00) that the bridge radius went from +12degrees to flat or below. :/ Can't say with certainty.

Keep the first guitar simple and take notes, my recommendation. Once you build it you'll see that you don't even like the hardware you got and this and that could be lighter or better.. And let me say the Bareknuckle Warpig is the best heavy/sludge DETUNED pickup I've knowingly heard. Doesn't sound great in E standard, which is odd. Drop to D and magic happens. Weird.

Good luck, keep us posted.

sorry to call you a wood name rather than your handle, cphanna.

No worries, Clay.
I think you can find quite a bit of useful reading right here in the forum archives. This is largely (but not exclusively) a community of acoustic builders, but a lot of these folks do build solid body instruments, too. Another good forum with a dedicated solid body sub-forum is:

mimf.com.

I believe they are still in the process of updating their archives after a recent software change, but there is a wealth of solid body info in that community. Check them out, too. You can find answers to most any question on this forum or that one. If you can't find what you're looking for, just ask again, and lots of generous folks will jump in to help you. Best luck to you!
Patrick

i think the walnut is a good choice for downtuned/distorted music, as it is quite hard and may contribute a bit of treble and give you some definition. despite what another poster believes, convention is, when you tune guitars low and use super hot pickups and play with tons of diode clipping effects(ie distortion pedals/modern amp circuitry), it sounds like mud. mud means, a wall of fizzy fuzz. thats great if you suck at playing guitar i guess, but i think most musicians hope that they might actually be heard at some point.
high output pickups dampen treble. so do mahogany necks, and to a lesser degree, mahogany bodies. so in my opinion, if you are playing downtuned(which guitar amps are not optimized for), heavily distorted music, then you need harder wood like maple and walnut, and lower output pickups, to try to preserve a bit of high end. you can always easily filter out treble if you want, but you can never add it.

Right now I play a Schecter, The pickups are from a small independent shop, can't remember the name. Signal goes into Soldano and a Laney. I get a lot of compliments on my sound. It's pretty thick and beefy. I hate the fizzies and try to cut gain and treble and add mids to avoid it. The Soldano is the key though. I love that thing.

Anyways I've heard a lot about Bare Knuckle pickups and was thinking about trying them. How much does wood choice really affect tone when you're factoring in pickup choice, amps, strings, etc.?

I'm prolly gonna start fight asking that.

There's a lot of opinion on this, as you know.
I enjoyed this discussion: viewtopic.php?f=10123&t=37563

I'm just finishing a guitar from black and Claro walnut and would agree on the heavy weight. I chambered the body on both sides of the neck through design 1" and it helped a lot with weight and opened up the sound a bit .

It is dense wood and takes patience with hand tools, well worth the effort.