Progress. Finally

Lately, I've had a little bit of progress.
That is, I've drawn the guitar out in full scale and I've bought a pickup on eBay. (I've also got a proper worktable.) Here's the drawing of the guitar:

Only the shape is dead set. Where the bridge, pickup and controls go may change. I'll probably move the bridge a cm or two closer to the neck to get better access to the upper frets. It's going to have 24 frets and a 25"/630 mm scale. The fretmarkers will probably not look like what they do here either.

The pickup I've bought is a Kent Armstrong Distortion humbucker, WPU10 Closed (EMG style). I'll post a picture of it as soon as I pick it up.

Planing the neck

After gluing the neck the laminates were not perfectly level, and so I needed to plane them. Before planing the neck looked like this:


You can see the glue all along the join lines, which is a good thing.
After planing the joint looked like this (only the top joint has been planed so far):


Unfortunately, I don't have a workbench yet, so I took the boards that I used when clamping the neck and clamped them to a fence in the garden and used them as a working surface. It was not very stable, so I'm not quite finished planing yet.

The provisional 'workbench':

Gluing the neck

The first thing I did was to glue the neck laminates. I glued one of the maple blanks to the walnut blank and let it dry for one day before I glued the other maple blank to them. I sawed some shelves from a book shelf we were tossing out into smaller pieces and put them between the clamps and the neck blanks, so I didn't make any unnecessary marks on the wood. I used Titebond glue which I got from Gilet Guitars, and applied plenty of glue. When I clamped the wood I checked that the glue was oozing out all along the length of the blanks. This means that you've applied enough glue. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the gluing.

The beginning

When I decided to start building a guitar, I did a fair bit of research. I found projectguitar.com very helpful, and I also got my hands on a copy of 'Make your own electric guitar' by Melvyn Hiscock, which I think is a very good book.

My guitar: The design for my guitar is going to be a neck-through construction with mahogany body and laminated neck from two pieces of maple, and one piece of walnut. In terms of hardware I've only got the bridge so far, which is a Gotoh tail piece with chrome finish.
I got the mahogany blanks from Gilet Guitars which is a luthier in Sydney, and the maple and walnut I got from Anagote Timbers. I've also got some extra walnut that was left over after cutting the neck blank. I might use this for volume knobs or binding for the neck etc.

Welcome to the guitar building catastrophe

Hi everyone!
I'm a 23 yo Norwegian student in Sydney, but this blog isn't really going to be about me. I've created this blog because I'm building an electric guitar and I thought it would be fun to post pictures and updates on my progression.