Homemade guitars

[ddj3891]

A co worker is looking to start an outside-the-box woodworking project (pardon the pun). Since he enjoys woodworking, and I've been toying with pedals, he thought we should join forces and build a guitar. Anyone here have any experience with such a project? Madbean has been super helpful in my pedal projects, so I'm wondering if there are any sites as helpful as this for that type of project.
Thanks.

[jimilee]

I've built from bodies I've gotten, never started from just a block of wood. There are 2 threads going right now, one is "decided to build a guitar" bean has modded a few.


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[Jebus]

I've built from bodies I've gotten, never started from just a block of wood.

Yeah, same here. I think my most played guitar is a Telecaster I put together when I was 14 or 15 years old.

There's also area about guitar building here: http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?board=64.0

[matmosphere]

There is a tele owners forum that has a killer DIY forum. Google Tele Home Depot

I built a guitar a while back and found it to be great resource. Nice community too very helpful and positive.

[Muadzin]

The thing about building guitars from scratch is that you need templates. Lots of templates. Templates of the body, template of the neck, template of the head stock, basically everything that has to be routed needs a template. You will be more busy creating templates, sanding them to the right shape, then you will be on working on your actual guitar. And for good reasons, as the better finished your templates are the less time you will have to spend on fixing any mistakes you made with your router. Because any imperfections that are left on your template the router will translate into the wood.

Also, building a body from scratch with a block of wood is fun. A lot easier then it seems. Building a neck on the other hand....

[mjg]

Here's one site I've found to be helpful - it takes you through the steps of building a guitar, and has dimensions and things that you might find useful:  http://www.monsterbass.nl/index.html

+1 to the templates.  I'm spending a lot of time getting templates for the body and pickups right before I do the final routing on the block of wood. 

The idea of doing the body doesn't worry me too much, but building the neck myself is another level of stupid.  I need to get the shape of the neck right, the truss rod installed correctly, the fret board levelled and with the correct radius, and then not mess up all the fret cuts, fret filing and fret levelling.  A pre-made neck would make it a lot easier, I guess it depends on what sort of woodworking you want to do, and how pedantic are you and your friend about doing it all yourself.