A quick update on the state of things, the future of things, and some reflections.

I’m exhausted, cycling to and from the workshop each day is tough going for me, and I already had a sore back before being hunched over a plunge router all day.

I’m also exhausted because I’ve spent the entire day each day completely focused on some new task that I’m learning. I’m surprised that by day 3 we’re already quite far along. That’s power tools for you I guess!

What I’ve got done so far

• Body blank selected, cut, shaped, contoured, and partially routed (cavities, but not trem, pickups, or neck pockets). I’m a bit worried that it’s still too heavy - I may simply go deeper on the belly cut to get some more material off. This involved making the templates for the cavities too.
• Neck template selected, truss rod routed and fitted, shape roughed and cut to dimensions with the plunge router
• Rough cut some pickguard material
• Cut the fretboard, sanded it to thickness, and cut the fret slots. It was quite straightforward once I was solid on the geometry of things. I cut them on a mini table saw set up for slotting a straightedge notched with the correct fret spacings into a registration pin, and then cutting one by one. It went fast, but there was some give in the jig, so the slots ended up slightly wider on one side of the board. I’m assured this is fine, but I wonder if other methods of cutting the fret slots wouldn’t have this issue (but would be much slower).

The plans

I’ve largely stuck to my plans in that I selected an offset blank, used non-endangered European hardwoods rather than exotic wood from the other side of the world.

I’ve been a bit of a computer deviant though. I’ve been intending to stick some kind of computer in a guitar for about a decade, and in a fit of something, I decided that now was the time. For these two weeks, that doesn’t mean much - I’m not going to try to do electronics hardware and software on top of this course. Instead I’ll do a simple traditional circuit and fit it all in the top cavity. In the future I’ll use the back cavity to house whatever monstrous PCB I devise. I have vague aspirations to do a fully analog signal chain controlled digitally, while also recording the raw values from both pickups. The idea being that in the studio you could post-facto change the pickup selector or “re-amp” the audio through a tone knob with a different setting, right there on the physical guitar in analog. It’ll also have no knobs. This means that my large rear cavity will have no holes in the top for pots, switches, or jacks. More grain! Instead, I will mount touch controls flush into the pickguard.

Yes, I too am thinking about how horrible car touchscreen reputations have. Luckily, if this is shit, I can just put knobs on.

The guitar folk are a bit bewildered by this whole thing, I suspect they’re fairly analog, which they’re probably right about (but not for Neil Young reasons).

Power Tools vs Hand Tools

This is probably the most striking aspect of the course - it depends a lot on power tools. For context, I’ve been doing hand-tool only woodworking for about a year. Partly because when power tools go wrong, they can go quite wrong, and it would be a bad idea for them to go wrong for me while I’m completely alone in my house. I also just romanticize the idea of hand tools, probably wrongly, though they have been used for thousands of years to do things that CNCs cannot currently do.

So far I’ve used:

• Sanders:
  • Belt
  • Oscillating spindle
  • …thicknessing?
  • (orbital is on deck)
• Saws
  • Band
  • Mini table saw with a fret blade
• Routers
  • Plunge
  • Table
• Drill press
• A lot of extractor fans

The shop has more, a CNC, and a table saw, both of which are off limits luckily. Incredibly, they have an actual real life honest to goodness radial arm saw, which I have generally been treating a bit of a meme, and saying things like “it’s called an arm saw because it mostly saws off peoples arms”. The luthier doesn’t trust this machine.

I’ve been amazed at the speed of progress. I suspect that even if I focused up and didn’t procrastinate at all (like I mostly do with woodworking, for fear of messing stuff up), hand tooling a guitar body would take orders of magnitude longer with hand tools. Maybe you could rough out the shape with an axe, but then I don’t even know what tool you would use to make the edges of the body square. A spokeshave and patience and hope and a lot of measuring?

There has been at least one case of “hand tools would do this better” though. To route the truss rod channel, a fence was attached to a plunge router, which went up and down the neck in several passes to route the channel. At one point, I didn’t hold the fence to the piece well enough, and had maybe 0.7mm drift. It was fine, it’s not going to be a problem - but I’m pretty sure that once you get past the first 0.5mm or 1mm of a similar cut using a plough plane, the groove would guide the tool, and you could not drift off the line once you were 5mm deep like I did. It’s also not a job that would take long with a plough plane. It would with mine though, which is an antique wooden thing, and I probably would need to replace it with the Veritas one.

I think the other jobs are fairly doable by hand - if you get really good at planing stock to flat and true, cut cavities with a chisel like a blind mortise, rough with an axe. Cutting to template seems hard, but maybe you’d use drawings instead. They would just take a lot of time.

Hopefully I get my workbench finished and actually try it!

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Thanks for reading, I still haven’t figured out feedback yet so if you know me from other things I guess just contact me that way.