zoharjackson.com - Electric Guitar Electric Guitar
I wanted an electric guitar but I didn’t want to spend money. So I decided to build on myself, well, at least the body.
Previously I had purchased a 6’x 1’ x 1” thick plank of pine. I cut it in half, and then cut the template out of each half. The plan was to glue the two halves together to create a body 2” thick. Unfortunately my band saw skills are rather lacking. So the pieces did not align very well. Regardless I epoxyed them together and belt sanded the sides down until it looked like one piece of wood.
The rest was easy; stain, gloss, and installation of all the parts. I only had one difficulty. I forgot to calculate the high the neck needed to be from the body. It turned out to be about 1cm to low, this caused the strings to jump off the bridge.
The bridge had to be lowered by 1cm. I need to remove the bridge mounts, drill the holes 1cm deeper then place them back in. There was only one way to remove the metal bridge mounts, burn the guitar. But then it hit me, the mounts protruded from the body by about 1cm. so I grabbed my belt sander and sanded the metal down like there was no tomorrow. Luckily I did not destroy the threads and the bridge mounted successfully.The plan was to buy a guitar neck, pickups, and resistors, from eBay and then build the body myself. I started by making a full scale blue print in Photoshop. It took a while to get all the measurements right since the bridge had to be exactly the same distance from the 12th fret as the head of the neck. After finally getting the measurements right I printed the template out on two sheets of paper, stapled and taped them together so the edges aligned, and took it to my friends shop.
Parts:
- Guitar neck ~~ $50
- 2 Fender Lace pickups ~~ $75
- 6’ x 1’ x 1” pine plank ~~ $9
- Wires, resistors, pickup switch ~~ $12
- Stain, varnish, epoxy ~~ Free
Total: $150
Conclusion:
So in the end it didn’t save me much money, but I made a nice looking guitar and had a good time doing it.