Guitar Building part 2

The pickguard with the electronics and the piezo pickup.

The routered pickup cavities. Later, I realized that the little one (for string loading) should have actually been six little holes. I'm probably just going to put a wooden block inside it with holes drilled in it.

Stupid camera. It won't focus on the piezo properly. Arrgh. I took about a dozen pictures of this trying to get it to focus. It never did.

The body partly cut out with the jigsaw.

The body mostly cut out with the electronics put in.

The bandsaw used to cut out the res of the body. Dad got it at a garage sale, and it's about 60 years old (the company that made it has gone out of buisness since then. We didn't have the right size blade, so Dad put an old scooter wheel on a metal beam to act as a third wheel so that the larger blade would fit. To see better, we duct taped on a flashlight.

Partly done sanding and routering the edges of the body.

Cutting out the pickguard.

Since when we tested the strings we only used the middle two, the bridge was miss aligned because we didn't see how far the outer two strings were from the sides. This picture is measuring where the bridge should actually go.

The volume knob. It really looks much better than that, the bad quality is the camera's fault.

This is Watson. Totally unrelated.

Everything screwed together for a WORKING TEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Guitar Building part 1

The "parts guitar". I bought it on craigslist, and it came with an amp and the cord shown in the picture.

The parts guitar with the strings taken off.

After taking the pickguard and neck off

Guitar guts.

The wood, after planeing and gluing. You can kind of see the outline I drew on it.

Neck pocket drama. Stupidly, Dad and I routered out the space about 2 millimeters too large, so this picture shows shims being glued on the side to fix the shape. We don't have enough C-clamps, so the wood in the middle is bracing the shims to the side.

The all important router (given to Dad by Grandpa. Thanks!)

The neck pocket done - FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!

The neck stuck in and the bridge resting on top.

Measuring the scale length. The scale length is the distance from the nut to the twelth fret, and the bridge has to be exactly twice that distance from the nut to make sure the intonation is correct.

The bridge clamped on to test the intonation. I played a couple songs on the middle two strings. I don't know why we didn't use the outer two strings instead. If we had, it probably would have saved us a lot of trouble down the road.