Twenty-third Passage

David is super duper talented and amazing in a dizzying number of things. One of those areas of talent are woodworking. He built himself his own electric guitar! And it's awesome! He did most of it before we met, but I stole some pictures of the process from his facebook page and I'll show you here what he did in less detail. I'll use his FB picture descriptions though, since I don't know a thing about this.

Theres my new guitar. Lets call this phase one.

Heres the neck getting glued up. Now I have to wait :(

Here's a rough plywood template of my guitar. It took forever to cut this out on a 9" bandsaw. I sure wish that I had a jigsaw.

Here's the outline of the guitar body, ready to be cut out.

Got the body cut out. It doesn't look like much now but once I get the top contoured and the 1/8" bloodwood stripe around the outside to frame it all in it will look so sweet!!!

routed out the slot in the neck for the truss rod to sit. Everything looks good. It's sitting perfectly flush with the surface.

Whew! after about 2 hours of sanding the neck is finally shaped the way that I want it.

 Here we go. Gluing and clamping the body together.

I had to make a jig to clamp down the binding around the edge evenly

 Here is the bridge Installed. Those two little chunks of metal cost more than twice as much as anything else on the guitar.

Put in the tuning machines this morning. I have the kids with me so I put in a movie and did it in the living room. Now I have plenty of wood shavings to vacuum off of the floor

I contoured the top and cut the holes for the pickups.

Got the frets in this evening.

I shined up the finish, put all the hardware on, the strung it up. You're looking at the finished product. Now I have to make tons and tons of little adjustments to make it play right.

But then he wanted to add the little dots to the side. I don't recall what they are called. So he bought a metal stick thing, (which has a more technical name, but, eh, I'm just Melanie.) And he sawed little pieces off. Which was very difficult. But then he got some clamps and it made it go much easier.

 Here David is using a stone thing to shine up the metal and make it nice and smooth.

 Now the scary part. Drilling holes into his pretty guitar neck. I'm so glad it didn't crack!

 See? Look at that! The little dots. Now you know what I'm talking about, right?

 Now he's sanding it down to make it all flush.

 After putting on a finish again, he is done! Isn't it pretty?

 I'm constantly blown away by David's abilities and talents. I'm so glad I have such a brag-worthy husband!

And here is the video of David playing his new guitar for the first time.