I guess all luthiers and wannabe luthiers make mistakes, but I have no idea how I missed this one! After inlaying the fretboard and installing frets and binding, I laid out the neck and hardware to begin figuring out the pickup routes. Do you see a problem in the picture below? You see that big gap between the end of the fingerboard and the neck pickup ring? That's because I had a stupid moment and cut the fingerboard to have 21 frets instead of the 22 a LP has..... so it looks like I have to make a new fingerboard. Maybe I can use this one on another project. Needless to say I was quite mad at myself about this mistake!
Over the past couple days I inlaid the fingerboard, installed the frets, and currently gluing the fretboard binding. Its fun seeing a guitar take shape!
Today I went at the LP body with my random orbital sander and some 60 grit sandaper. The top carves are looking a bit better. Still need to do some more work but thought I'd post a couple quick pics of the top. I think the flame in this top will look nice under a finish!
I made up a template out of MDF and routed the neck pocket into the body. I had some difficulties, mostly due to cheap router bits and inexperience using power tools, but it turned out well. I routed the neck pocket slightly undersized so that I could work the neck tenon down to a tight fit. It took me a while to do it but eventually I got a good fitting neck. Its not as perfect as I'd like, but still good. And he neck is centered nicely too! My maple top was still a bit too thick, so I planed the rest of the top to the proper thickness. The top of a Les Paul as I understand it actually has 2 angles in it. The neck plane sets the neck angle (between 4 and 4.4 degrees), but then the pickup plane goes from the neck pickup to the bridge and is about 1 to 1.5 degrees. I now have the neck angle done, and the thickest point of the maple top. This thickest point is the level my bridge will be at, so I mocked up the bridge and tailpiece to see if my neck angle will be good, and its just about perfect! Next I will plane in that 1 degree pickup plane and route the pickup cavities, as well as smooth out the top contours! My neck blank wasn't wide enough to make the headstock without gluing on ears so I used scrap that I cut out of the blank. Next I will thickness the headstock, shape it, and install the trussrod. I haven't decided on a headstock veneer yet. I'll update again soon when I have more done! Just a little update on the LP build. I've done some work on the neck. First I laid out all the neck dimensions on my neck blank, then routed the truss rod slot. I'm using a Stewmac HotRod on this build, same as my maple L-0. I'm also planning on using a Stewmac rosewood fingerboard that I got off E-Bay. Then I roughed out the neck blank and the tenon. I'll have to glue some ears on to the blank for the headstock. On the body, I used hand planes to carefully plane the neck angle to the top of the guitar, then marked out the neck tenon route location. I guess that's it for now! |
Archives
January 2015
Categories |