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Ok, so i know what my first build is going to be. I'm going to go with strat with the 70's style reverse headstock. My step dad is getting me a piece of birds eye for the neck.....but with the few skills I have, I'm hesitating whether I should use it or not. I have a question about the body though........I live in a small town and the store I'm going to for wood doesn't have much. Sooooooo I was wondering if it is possible to use 1x6's and ply 2 together then join those two pieces. It seems not to be a horrible idea because most cheap guitars are made with plywood......can anyone give me some more info on this or some advice to make this work out the best possible way.

The 1x6's are also maple.

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" Blues is a low down achin chill, if you ain't never had it, I hope you never will."

Robert Johnson

Good luck to you. As far the neck do not use the bird's eye maple for your first guitar. It has it's own set of problems when making a neck and necks are by far the hardest part of the guitar to make. You are going to make mistakes. Where do you live. Almost every town has wood useful for making a guitar. Just get regular maple for the neck. Since you'll be using a truss rod for the neck regular maple will work. If you're concerned with that then take 3 piece of maple and glue them together, standing up, not horizontal sandwich style. That will give you a very stable neck, of course a truss rod is still neccessary. As for the body I wouldn't use plywood, you can use any hardwood. Maple, ash, alder...just about anything. Maple is very cheap and you can glue it up into bigger pieces, just do length wise pieces, meaning don't do end grain to engriain gluing.

I think he means joining two 1X6s together to make a body blank that is 1" deep, 12" wide. In this case it is fine to do, as many (most?) electrics have body's that are 2 or three pieces.

As for using your good wood on your first guitar, I think wait until you feel confident with your skills, this could be soon. but is right that there will be some mistakes on the first neck you make. You learn so much from your mistakes so its alright. The first one I did was on a piece of scrap that was nearly as big as the electric neck with no finger board. It had its dips and valleys, not perfectly strait. Then I made a real electric neck and it was close enough to acceptable for my standards.

Stefan

Sure you can glue up a body blank. I am refinishing a buddy's Fender bass right now, that someone had already stripped. It is a multiple piece glue-up. Strat's were made to be easy to put together and therefore cheap to produce. That's probably why they painted them, so they didn't have to use super pretty wood.

Darrin

Dylanger,

One thing to consider with the wood you're using is that it will scratch more easily than most of the woods commonly used for solid body guitars. That said, it should be just fine tonally - maybe even really good.

-Dave

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David Morris