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Here's a look at my first build, it's a LP DC with a sapele body, flame maple top, back and sides and laminated neck. I'm using a ziricote fretboard and plan on covering the headstock with west african ebony. Looking to do a root beer burst finish as you can see from the finish sample.



I've abandoned using the copper tailpiece for now, I'm planning on using it for another project down the road. Here's a pic of the bookmatched, flame maple top being glued on:



It's soft maple, but it's got really nice figure. I don't think it'll matter once the stain goes on. Here's a better pic:

Roughed out the neck and routed for the truss rod. I had a bit ground down at my sharpener's so the truss rod fits tight, but I'm wondering if I want to keep doing it this way. Had a bit of a disaster on my second neck and might be looking to just use a table saw from now on. Also in this pic you can see the pickup routs are done and the face is recessed for knobs.



The edge treatment is my fix for a stupid mistake. I was overly anxious to rout the top flush to the body and used a bit I knew I shouldn't have. It ended up blowing out a fairly large area of sapele and so I decided to wrap the body with figured maple down the road. Basically I drew an alternate template for the whole thing that was in 1/4" inch all the way around and routed the whole body down to it, just under the maple top. Then I added these pieces all the way around to build it back out so I wouldn't lose any size overall. This has been the biggest headache of this build, but I never expected guitar building to be easy. I guess now that I've finished the fix I feel a great deal of relief and accomplishment by actually bringing it back from the brink.

Here's a view of the control cavity cover:



I cut it out of the same piece so the grain matches, it's quite a bit smaller but it's my first time trying something like this. I was using a standard coping saw and need some practice, lol.

Here's a pic of me holding the guitar up by it's unglued neckjoint. I'm making this a bolt-on, but was very careful to get this joint as tight as possible. The neck pocket is tapered towards the headstock and has a flat bottom. I've angled the heel of the neck a little over two degrees to get the right pitch.

Here's a look at the fretboard, slotted and installed on the neck, abalone dots in place.



As you can see I went with a rout for the TOM bridge, a la Carvin. My main reasoning for this has to do with the fact that my top is not thick enough to get a deep carve and therefore I was worried about running out of maple at the neck joint if I were to use a 4 degree angle. It's profiled to have a minimum appearance and you can hardly see it when the bridge is in place.

Here's a pic of me chucking it in the scrap bin:



Just kidding! This pic does give a clue to the next detail I'm going to post though, in my scarf joint I included a layer of walnut that has become part of the volute which you can see

Here:


I'm really pleased with how this came out, I had envisioned it to be very much like this but wasn't sure if it would work.

this is a view of the minimal heel on the neck joint, as well as the control cavity and rough chambering. The chambering was done mainly to shave a little weight as sapele is quite a bit heavier than mahogany and I really didn't want a boat anchor. My back is bad enough already!



Due to a rather nasty incident at my shop (my dayjob, cabinet shop) I ended up being out of commission for three months starting in January. I partially tore a ligament in my left thumb and lost use of it for anything but the lightest of duty tasks. I spent this time building a guitar making shop, that is currently at a friend's house as I lack the space in my own for such things. During this downtime however I did manage to do a rough set up on the guitar just to make sure I had crossed my t's and dotted my i's. I had installed the frets before the fretboard was glued on the neck and so it was really a matter of installing the tuning machines and bridge posts.



I managed to play some chords very gingerly with my gimpy, left hand and the tuning held! The intonation was almost perfect right from the beginning. The guitar feels very lively, not flat at all and has nice resonance. My goal was for the guitar to sound loud even when it wasn't plugged in, and I have been quite happy with the result.

flash forward to the last couple of weeks. Through being super busy at work, and getting my shop in proper order (almost) I haven't spent as much time on the guitars as I'd have wanted until about a month ago. The last few weeks I have been in fits trying to bend some flame maple banding to trim out the outside edge. I'm not going to go into all of that here as I've talked about it elsewhere on the site already. Needless to say, this was my first foray into bending wood and first time using a pipe bender. Last weekend I managed to get one piece out of four that I had to bend to fit one side.



Today I went back and did the other. The learning curve on this is pretty steep and I still have much to learn. I feel like I did okay getting 2 out of 7 pieces to bend properly and I'm glad I managed to get the most figured pieces to work. I had four pieces to try today and I graded them in order of most figured to least figured. I ended up getting my number two to fit. (there was a pretty substantial drop in quality from number 2 to number 3)

Here's a look at the girl wrapped up in rubber! This was my first time clamping this way and I have to say I found it pretty challenging. I made a pretty big mess of myself and my bench and had a couple gaps which I managed to pull in with some binding tape, (that stuff is ridiculously strong!).



And finally, here's what it looked like when I took the straps off:



From here, I've got to do some binding and purfling, some light contouring (either a very shallow LP type carve, or a pillow top where the top is flat but the outer edge is softened down, I think the PRS Santana is done this way) Lots of sanding, finishing and installing my Tom Anderson Pup's along with a PRS style rotary tone selector/coil splitter.

I don't have any books on the subject and have gotten all the info for this build by googling. I have a stack of bookmarks a half mile long! If only I would have found this place sooner, it's really such a wealth of information and most of my questions have already been discussed on here. I really spent a lot of time taking in as many different perspectives as I could and tried to distill the info down to what seemed to come up the most in discussions. There are a ton of contradictory opinions it seems about nearly everything guitar related and you've got to have your bullspit detector set on high, but it's really amazing what you can do with a computer these days.

Anyways, any feedback is much appreciated and I'll post updates as they come!

Looking real good - keep us apprised.

_________________
"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Thanks Chris! I'll update as it progresses