| Blog series by kenstonge | updated 809 days ago | 4 parts | 7855 reads | 14 comments total |
Part 1: Cleaning up the guitar neck and body
I’m new to Lumberjocks and this is my first post. It catches me in the middle of a project — a Les Paul Jr. electric guitar, which is being built as part of a class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking. I should finish it some time in April. Last week, I finished installing fretmarkers on the neck, which was built out of solid mahogany with an African ebony fingerboard. Complete pictures of the guitar in progress, from start to current, can be found on Flickr.
Part 2: Cleaning up body
Spent a lot of time sanding the pore-filled body and headplate of the guitar. Starting to look good.
Part 3: Fretting the neck, routing the pocket
After three months of once-a-week woodworking, my Les Paul Jr. project is finally starting to look like a guitar. I spent the first hour of my class installing frets on the guitar’s neck, a process that involves fretwire, a fretting hammer, a few clamps, flush-trimming pliers, some CA glue and a file. The basic process is to cut the fretwire — which had been radiused to 10 inches — for each fret, leaving an extra quarter- to half-inch on either side. Cutting the fretwire Next, I c...
Part 4: Neck-Carving
I spent most of last night carving the neck for my Les Paul Jr., a process that is somewhat tedious, but also a lot of fun. The carving was done with an oscillating spindle sander, files, a spokeshave and a card scraper. The first step is to rough out the height of the neck. First, I took measurements of the heigh of the neck using a caliper, which I measured against the plans for a ‘59 Les Paul. In this case, I used the first, seventh and twelfth frets as reference points. Using a c...
