Les Paul from scratch - non warmoth
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Cagey
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As I said, the glue is stronger than the wood, so I wouldn't expect the joint itself to fail, but right in front of or behind it, where the wood grain takes some longitudinal stress parallel to the grain. It sort of "peels" away, although that's not really the right word; "shear" is the term, where you have opposing forces applied in parallel.
If you take a piece of wood and snag into it from the end of the grain, you can pull away splinters/chunks relatively easily compared to a compression load where the force is perpendicular to the grain. You have a similar problem with shear loads vs. torsional or bending loads.
If you take a piece of wood and snag into it from the end of the grain, you can pull away splinters/chunks relatively easily compared to a compression load where the force is perpendicular to the grain. You have a similar problem with shear loads vs. torsional or bending loads.
Cagey said:
Yeah I agree. If the grain ran the same direction and you had a flat headstock I still feel you would have less breaks. The neck landing on the headstock cannot help. I really do not know how I missed making sure the grain at least ran the correct direction. On a positive note my neck will be really strong against all lateral forces.
That's a good positive spin. Hopefully you'll be ok with the lamination and the neck-thru helping a bit. Looks good. Keep it up. Once again you are just diving head first into a project and running away with it. I still remember all the shit from the Tele and you still finished it in what seemed like a couple of days. Good luck. Be proud.
Band saws are for wussies.
Not really. I really wish I had one. It would have saved me a ton of time. A jigsaw takes forever to cut through 2 ½” hardwood.
Not a terrible amount of progress, but progress all the same. I finished doing the truss rod channels for the final two guitar necks. It was much easier the second and third time around. I used the same method of a straight edge. I really like the truss rods I bought. Only having to do a flat channel is much easier.
I cut out the rough shape of my neck using my drill press and jigsaw. This is where it would have been nice to have a band saw. It went fine it just took forever. I am going with 9/16” thick for the headstock and 5/8” thick on the neck. Once you add the fretboard I will be around .9” to 1”. I set it up thicker so I can stay thicker if I want or go thinner if I don’t like it.
I was able to taper two of my three neck blanks. I forgot to take a picture of how I did it, but I will make sure I do when I do the last neck. Basically it is a board (straight on one edge) that I screwed into the neck. One screw at the first humbucker route (or where it will be) and one screw at the back of the neck that will be chopped off once the body is joined. I really wanted to be able to get the “wings” of the guitar joined today, but I ran out of time. I cut one of the body wings to the approximate size, but did not get a chance to plane it with my router. I also need to run my flush cut bit to clean up where the maple meets the rosewood as well as run my router bit for the binding. I want to have the binding channel cut before I attach the bodies as it will make putting the binding on much easier since I won’t have to chisel near the neck.
I put the neck and the body of the scale and this thing tips in at 15 pounds. I am definitely going to have to take material off the back. I think I may do comfort curves like a tummy cut and such. That takes more material off than just removing 1/2". That rosewood is the culprit though I think. The carve on the top should really help as well. The good new is I think it is starting to look like a real guitar now. :headbang:
Not really. I really wish I had one. It would have saved me a ton of time. A jigsaw takes forever to cut through 2 ½” hardwood.
Not a terrible amount of progress, but progress all the same. I finished doing the truss rod channels for the final two guitar necks. It was much easier the second and third time around. I used the same method of a straight edge. I really like the truss rods I bought. Only having to do a flat channel is much easier.
I cut out the rough shape of my neck using my drill press and jigsaw. This is where it would have been nice to have a band saw. It went fine it just took forever. I am going with 9/16” thick for the headstock and 5/8” thick on the neck. Once you add the fretboard I will be around .9” to 1”. I set it up thicker so I can stay thicker if I want or go thinner if I don’t like it.
I was able to taper two of my three neck blanks. I forgot to take a picture of how I did it, but I will make sure I do when I do the last neck. Basically it is a board (straight on one edge) that I screwed into the neck. One screw at the first humbucker route (or where it will be) and one screw at the back of the neck that will be chopped off once the body is joined. I really wanted to be able to get the “wings” of the guitar joined today, but I ran out of time. I cut one of the body wings to the approximate size, but did not get a chance to plane it with my router. I also need to run my flush cut bit to clean up where the maple meets the rosewood as well as run my router bit for the binding. I want to have the binding channel cut before I attach the bodies as it will make putting the binding on much easier since I won’t have to chisel near the neck.
I put the neck and the body of the scale and this thing tips in at 15 pounds. I am definitely going to have to take material off the back. I think I may do comfort curves like a tummy cut and such. That takes more material off than just removing 1/2". That rosewood is the culprit though I think. The carve on the top should really help as well. The good new is I think it is starting to look like a real guitar now. :headbang:
DMRACO said:
The rosewood top is 3/4" and the body is 1 3/4" so a total of 2 1/2". I believe most Les Paul guitars are 2" or 2 1/4". Most flat tops are 1 3/4". I am going to put it together as is and then do the carve top. If it is still really heavy I may cut some material off of the bottom and make it 2 1/4". If even that still bothers me then I will add the tummy cut ect. I will play it by ear. I don't really mind heavy guitars.
dmraco
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My Les Paul at the endge is 1.8". With the carved top it is around 2.1" to the best of my measurments. It is hard to get the calipers up that high. I think you could safely go to around 2.25" in the center and be OK. It all depens on the dergree of carved top you want. The main number to look at is the edge profile at 1.8".
DMRACO said:
My binding is .25" so in order to be around 1.8" I need to take about .25" off the bottom of the guitar. That would put me at 1.75" for the edge and 2.25" to the top of the carve. If I take it off the top then my carve would be .25" high. As is I have about .5" for the carve. I may even make an 1/8" of the rosewood show below the binding and do the carve top above that. It could look cool and it would be unique.
Cagey
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If you're going to take anything off the back, now's the time to do it. Once it's glued up, it'll be extremely difficult to find a saw large enough to resaw it. Also, once the front's carved, you can't easily run it through a planer or drum sander to thin the thing out. You pretty much have to decide now how thick you want the thing to be, and adjust if necessary. I know you said weight doesn't bother you, but you'd be an oddball if that were true with an albatross like that hanging around your neck. Most people have trouble holding up an 8 or 9 pound Les Paul for very long. At the rate you're going, that's going to be a 12 or 13 pounder.
You might also want to consider that binding was originally used on acoustics to hide glue joints. If you just notch it into an oversize top and leave edges showing, everybody will know it's just "bling" and call it pretentious. Of course, everybody knows binding serves little or no purpose on an electric other than aesthetics, but still. Something to think about. You don't wanna look like a floozy who never learned to apply makeup properly <grin>
You might also want to consider that binding was originally used on acoustics to hide glue joints. If you just notch it into an oversize top and leave edges showing, everybody will know it's just "bling" and call it pretentious. Of course, everybody knows binding serves little or no purpose on an electric other than aesthetics, but still. Something to think about. You don't wanna look like a floozy who never learned to apply makeup properly <grin>
Cagey said:
Yeah, I plan on doing that before I attach the wings. The only shaping that will happen after is if I contour the back and the top carve. I was actually worried that if I left some rosewood below that it would just look like I screwed up. Most carve tops use 5/8 for the top. Mine is 3/4 so its 1/8" taller. Not too bad. I think the carve will still look nice even at 1/2". I think I would rather take 1/2" off the back than 1/4" off the rosewood and 1/4" off the maple.
After that I have pretty much every design decision made except one. The carve top. There are a bunch of ways of doing the carve and I am not sure which to do. There is the traditional carve that starts flat and then carves up and then there is the dome carve that starts the curve right from the binding. I have time before I have to make that decision though. Most guitars I see have the former though. I think the carve top tele guitars that Warmoth sells are dome tops.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
My carved top bodies were a little on the fat side so it was time to cut them down. I don’t have a planer or a drum sander or a band saw so I had to make do with what I had. A router. I set my router to ½” and went at it.
It takes a bit of time routing all this out, but you do what you have to do. Once I got to this point there is not enough room for the router base to sit on. In comes this baby.
A ½ piece of wood I had sitting around. I actually set my router depth gauge to this exact piece of wood just in case it varied a little bit. It worked great. I didn’t have time to do the other carved top so that will have to wait. In the mean time, here are the new slimmer and lighter bodies.
The two halves weigh in at 5.9 lbs and the entire thing plus the neck is 11.8 lbs. I was a little surprised at how much weight taking a ½” off removed. Once the carved top is done it is possible they could be 5.25 lbs or so. The neck still needs profiling as well so I am guessing the guitar will be about 10 lbs. Not too bad.
After looking at the sides of the guitar (the one on the left I quick did a pass on a part of it with the flush cut bit so I could see what it looked like) I think I may skip doing a binding. I originally had intended the first guitar to have a Padauk body, but now with the maple I don’t like the rosewood, white and then maple. There just isn’t enough contrast. I think I will put binding on the Padauk flat top guitar, but the two carved tops will be binding less.
My carved top bodies were a little on the fat side so it was time to cut them down. I don’t have a planer or a drum sander or a band saw so I had to make do with what I had. A router. I set my router to ½” and went at it.
It takes a bit of time routing all this out, but you do what you have to do. Once I got to this point there is not enough room for the router base to sit on. In comes this baby.
A ½ piece of wood I had sitting around. I actually set my router depth gauge to this exact piece of wood just in case it varied a little bit. It worked great. I didn’t have time to do the other carved top so that will have to wait. In the mean time, here are the new slimmer and lighter bodies.
The two halves weigh in at 5.9 lbs and the entire thing plus the neck is 11.8 lbs. I was a little surprised at how much weight taking a ½” off removed. Once the carved top is done it is possible they could be 5.25 lbs or so. The neck still needs profiling as well so I am guessing the guitar will be about 10 lbs. Not too bad.
After looking at the sides of the guitar (the one on the left I quick did a pass on a part of it with the flush cut bit so I could see what it looked like) I think I may skip doing a binding. I originally had intended the first guitar to have a Padauk body, but now with the maple I don’t like the rosewood, white and then maple. There just isn’t enough contrast. I think I will put binding on the Padauk flat top guitar, but the two carved tops will be binding less.
DMRACO said:
I am not sure what type of finish I am going to do. The tele I built I did a laquer finish but I don't really know what to do with this one. I need to do some research on finishes for wood bodies. I like the durability of laquer and I have her tong oil and lineseed are not as hard of finishes. It is possible the maintenance on them is real easy though. I am going to have to peruse the DIY finishing section for a bit
