Making an Electric Guitar: Part 1

I'm really excited in the shop today to have a chance to talk with my daughter, Ginny, the middle kid, about the guitar that she's making. So this has been a process she's working on for a long time now. So Ginny, first thing, are you willing to say to everybody who you're making the guitar for? 'Cause it is a surprise. Well, it's a surprise, but you know, as long as it's like, we'll keep it between everyone, you know, Okay, just the million or so everyone who watches this.

Probably not a million, you know. Oh, thanks. Especially if you're in the videos. Oh, thanks. No, but I'm making this for my boyfriend, Ryan.

I'm pretty sure he figured it out because I kept asking questions about like, oh so what kind of guitars do you like? And he's like, ummmm, but yeah. So you ask questions about guitars and you learn that he really likes what style of guitar. It's a Thunderbird style. He plays the electric guitar and he has one that's a Epiphone, Les Paul.

And so he's always talking about how he likes like, oh yeah I've always wanted like a Thunderbird in like a Gibson style. And I'm like, all right, cool. So I thought it'd be kinda neat. 'Cause I, when Ginny took this project on, I says to her, I says, this is fine but I'm not, I'm helping, but I'm not doing the work. So I thought it'd be cool to on the video here, record the some of the process of Ginny going through the guitar build.

And then we're also taking a lot of pictures and that'll evolve into a story that we do later. So, so far you did some research on the body. Yep. And this is a wood that I had never heard of. So you found something that I'm not at all familiar with.

What's the name of this wood? This one is called African Limba. And basically I chose this because it's the best type of wood you can get for an acoustic guitar but this is an electric guitar. It has like the best acoustic sound quality. And it's got like a really good density.

So it's going to be a little heavier but it's supposed to be a really good wood, so. All right. And then when we found this, do you remember what these, did we get one big piece, or did we get multiple pieces, how did that shake out. We got three really big, really heavy pieces. And then we sanded them down and we cut two pieces, I think.

Well, there's three that make up the body. Yeah, it's three. And then they were cut to shape. So it was a little bit of a challenge because this is a particularly large bodied guitar. So it was a little bit of a challenge to find the Limba that would make a big enough blank to do the guitar.

So how did we know how big the body had to be? All right. We got plans off the lovely internet. The world wide inter web. Inter web?

Alright, so we got some plans off the internet. And so like this is what the plan looks like. We glued it to a piece of wood. And so yeah, it really showed just how like to do everything. And so it fits pretty nicely when we're cutting it out.

And what's cool about this. You know, the beauty of the internet is you can find nearly anything. So once we found the plan, it showed us where the bridge is going to go, where the electronics are going to go. So that simplified that part of the process and having made a couple of acoustic guitars, I didn't really want to make the neck, 'cause I'm lazy that way. So tell the folks at home about this.

I think this was a great find on the neck. This was pretty cool. All right, so this is a maple neck. We ordered it off Amazon. What was it like 60 bucks.

About 60 bucks. 60 bucks, and it came with the frets and the markers and the head is uncarved. So we're going to figure out what kind of design we want for that. And so basically like the only thing we really have to do is shape the head and maybe shave down the frets, they're a little pointy. They're a little sharp on the edges and it's nice they give you enough real estate on that headstock.

You can do whatever you want. And then the way the neck in this particular case joins to the body is with a pocket. So you did this work, right. Mm-hmm. And what tool did you use to create that?

I used a router and so we set in a certain like cut in here. So we tested out on a piece of wood and then we went through and we did it and just like cut this out to fit perfectly to the neck's size here. So that part was a little dicey 'cause it's gotta be a good fit. So just like Ginny said created a template first based on this shape and then with a router and a pattern style bit, and you'll see all of that in the article, got that to be a really, really good fit. And then the other thing that's interesting, just with the Firebird Thunderbird Firebird.

Which one is it? I can't ever tell them apart, I'm pretty sure... Firebird I think. Firebird and then Thunderbird is the base. Thunderbird is the base of the guitar, yeah.

Good thing we know what we're doing. It's got this interesting shoulder, this relief on the top and did that using a rabbiting table on a jointer before this was cut to shape while the blank was still a rectangle, we cut that shoulder in on the jointer, which was, I'm just not sure how else we would have accomplished that. So that's pretty cool. Now, as far as you know, what's happening next? What's the next couple of things we got.

The next thing we're doing is shaping the edges. So in like the normal Firebird you have like kind of slanted edges. So it's like a bit smoother there. So we're going to slant this and then we're going to get our electronics which are Seymour Duncan. So they're going to be pretty nice.

And then we've got to get those fitted in. We have some like people we're going to talk to about that because we have no idea how to do that. But we can learn almost anything. We will learn everything on the internet. All right, anything else you want to tell the folks at home about your guitar.

Hi mom. All right, well, it's been a blast doing this with Ginny and we'll give you progress reports as we go in order to keep you up to date on Ginny and the guitar she's making for her boyfriend. Whew!