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I've been building cigar box guitars for about a year now and I decided that it was high time I build an actual guitar! Im making a telecaster neck through design with a soft curly maple neck, honduran mahogany wings, and Ill be putting some walnut burl veneer over the mahogany on the face of the guitar only. Ive got a compound radiused ebony fretboard from stewmac. Im going to arm this monster with a floyd rose two p90s (maybe the seymour duncan p-rail p90/single coil/humbucker in the bridge http://www.seymourduncan.com/products/e ... ils_shpr1/ ). I know that p90s and a floyd dont really go together, but I figured Hell, I want p90s and I want a floyd rose so why not slap both on a tele! Ive Actuall gotten through a good portion of the build already, im currently just about ready to start rounding the neck. Lemme know what you think or if you have any suggestions! -Alex

Heres the raw materials


Cut the mahogany into wings



Veneered the mahogany

Trimmed the veneer off of the sides and belt sanded to smoothness

coming together

Got a rough cut on the body, needs a little sanding







Routed the neck for a single action truss rod and two carbon fiber rods. I accidentally let the wood jump of the fence once or twice when routing for the carbon fiber rods, but it will fill with some epoxy no problem before the fretboard goes on. I routed the truss rod slot deeper in the middle to accommodate a curved truss rod.

Good work. Yeah, those slips can be fixed easily. Want to know a trick? If you wrap your truss rod in plastic wrap before you glue down the fret board. it will make for a tighter fit, and also prevent future rattling!

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David Morris

I like the veneer on the mahogany.
Keep the pics coming!

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Old growth, shmold growth!

That's an abomination, alright! An abominably good one! I likey! A lot!

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Mike

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

By now Ive tapered the neck and glued on the scarf jointed headstock. Ive got to do some re-routing through the headstock and I gotta say its really kickin my a**. Right now im just takin a break before I go out and do some more. Excited to finish the routing!

I routed this space out for the wires to run through from the pickup cavities and go to the control cavity, but inforunately I discovered that this particular cavity will not work with the floyd cavity so its gotta get filled!






I cut and sanded some mahogany then glued it into place. Here it is after snading. Fits like a glove!

I tapered the neck and attached the headstock blank. The headstock blank is two pieces of scrap curl maple that I had from the neck (not book-matched) and I re-routed the slots for the truss rod and carbon fiber rods through the scarf joint







Here is is with the truss rod and carbon fiber rods in the neck. You can see marks on the headstock where the router bit skipped across when I was routing the cavity for the truss rod nut. In this pic it is filled with epoxy. I will soon be putting some burl veneer over the front of the headstock so this little mistake will be hidden

Part of one of the carbon fiber rods was sitting a hair about the neck. The rod was in there to tight to pull out so I just tapped off the neck with painters tape and took a little bit off the top of the rod with a dremel.





This is the piece of wood that I'll be cutting up to be the strip that I use to glue in the truss rod. It is a piece of padauk I had laying around and it was JUST the right size. Its pretty Ironic because I wanted somethind like padauk or hard maple on top of the rod to brighten up the sound of the guitar a little bit (probably makes an almost un-noticeable change in the sound but I still wanted it )





Here it is fresh off the table saw and ready to go!





After cutting the rod to length and threading it, I put some JBweld on the rear threads of the rod and on the slug (which I ground the top off of to let me get more of a curve) to keep them from un-screwing.

Tomorrow I should be able to glue on the wings!