a younger ambition

my youngest daughter would like to say she loves to look at every bodies awesome projects here, the two of us browse on a regular basis, and she was wondering if her project was worthy of posting here. OF COURSE SWEETIE!

so a couple years ago ( when she was 8 yrs old) she comes home from school with her latest science experiment homework, excited. she proceeds to tell me that they were given an assignment to build a tunable instrument for class and that they had 1 month to do it. i said thats awesome and asked what she had in mind ( and realizing that i would be involved). she proceeded to tell me she wanted to build a guitar. well i have never done it before so i said she needed to research it and find what she could. my mistake for thinking a plan for a cardboard and tube stringy thing was on its way. she presented to me the next day a picture with a set of plans and that it would have to be scaled down for her size. all in wood because thats how they are made. OKAY i obviously stepped into this, so we went to the shop with strict instructions that i was to help as little as possible. no problem as she has been in the shop since she was 3 yrs old building things from all the scraps she could glue together. so seeing as we only had a month she asked what to use as she was gong to paint it herself. i thought mdf would work fine, easy to cut, sand and paint, besides it was an experiment. we set up the overhead projector and she traced the outline on to a 1/4 mdf, she let me cut the rough shape which she then sanded up on the spindle sander. next she retrieved some lengths from the garbage and directed me on how to cut the pieces to fit around the shape of the body. as i cut pieces she set up the 23 gauge nailer and started to glue and nail the pieces to the back.
the next day before she arrived home from school, i took the liberty of cleaning op the rough shape so she could fill and sand, big mistake, i was not to touch her project without her. apologies all around, but i explained that she couldn’t use the router yet, so then she set to filling the body and then back to the spindle sander to smooth it up. then on to the neck assembly, she picked out a piece of poplar and drew the shape on it. she asked if she could cut it out so i set up our small 9” bandsaw, gave safety instruction and stood back, she carefully cut and then off to the spindle sander to smooth that up, then some gluing and hand sawing and hand rasping, all her work, and then finally sanding. this all over the course of a week. then we got busy with family things for a week and then back to the shop for the paint. she already knew what she was doing as she has painted many projects already. now for the strings we went and picked up real guitar strings but i had forgot about the tuner knobs, so she sat for bit then asked me if we had some bolts to just turn in and wrap the string on, sure no problem. off to the parts bins and she spots some eye bolts and says thats perfect dad, just help me drill a small hole through the threads and then the string can wind up on them, done no problem.

in the end she did about 85-90% of the work and yes it is even a reasonably tunable guitar. she had to have me come to school to confirm that she did the work, along with about 40 detailed pictures of her working on it. now 2yrs later she plays on a real guitar and loves it, the first guitar hangs proudly beside the real guitar in her room.