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Things I learned about building guitars

Here is a poorly written, hastily compiled list of things I learned while building my first home made guitar. Not exactly a How To, more like a Be Sure To Remember. It might be useful to other new folks with no experience. (It’s always better to watch someone else make mistakes than to make them yourself lol)

I built the body of my guitar out of eucalyptus shelving from a hardware store. It worked just fine, but it’s heavy and the guitar sounds a bit too tinny. A left over length of the shelving was what I used as a flat surface to do a lot of the work on – only it wasn’t flat for long! It started to bow upward quite noticeably after a few days in the dry winter Albertan environment, and having the furnace on 24/7 didn’t help. I flipped the board over to let the other side dry and it flattened out after awhile, but I’ve read (on the interwebs) that some people who try to build guitars out of hardware store wood end up having big splits form and run down the bodies of their guitar, because the wood wasn’t properly dried out. Something to watch out for. You could either just dry out the wood every time as a precaution, or use a length of wood and see if it bows after a few days, or, you know, buy real tone wood.

Go slowly.

A drum sander in a drill press is FANTASTIC for making the “recurve” around the lip of the Les Paul top. Go slow, use a medium grit drum (the coarse drums leave lines that are a major pain when you get to finish sanding because they seem to go deeper than the San Andreas Fault.

A rasp is the single best tool for making your neck profile. My first instinct when it came time to shape the neck was to use a power tool of some sort – drum sander, belt sander, oscillating sander. But I worried I might not be able to make the neck perfect… And I can tell you after doing a practice neck I was right. A rasp on the other hand will make a perfect neck, albeit it will take longer and make your arm hurt. It helps to tape some cardboard or something onto the back of the headstock when you’re rasping too, just to make a buffer for when you inevitably rasp a little too enthusiastically and run into the headstock.

Go slowly.

If you don’t know what angle to route the neck plan and mortise at (it varies between 2 and 4.4 degrees depending on who you listen to. Probably because 59 Les Pauls were all a little different, and might have HAD slightly different neck angles.) get a big piece of paper (or tape some together) and draw a diagram of the guitar. Put your bridge on the paper and mark the height, then the pickup ring, and trace the strings from the bridge to the nut. It’s a pain but you will be SURE your neck angle works for your hardware and your guitar.

I didn’t do this, so “out of the box” as it were, my guitar had an action right up in slide-player land. I ended up taking the bridge posts out and resting the bridge directly on the guitar to lower the action. (With a couple layers of masking tape on the bottom of the bridge to keep it from scratching of course)

If you hammer your frets in, be very careful around the ends because it’s insanely easy to bend it on the edge of the fingerboard and mess up.

Order 2′ more fret wire than you think you’ll need, because unless you are a skilled fret-putter-inner you will redo a few.

Go slowly.

Use the runny superglue, not gel superglue, if you plan on gluing the frets in.

I made my own fret pressing caul by taking a scrap piece of maple and using the drum sander to sand it to the radius of my fingerboard. It worked decently but had to be resurfaced after every 5 frets because the wood wasn’t hard enough.

If you bend the fret wire to the radius of your fretboard by hand, go slowly and carefully – you don’t want to twist the wire or it wont seat right in the fret slot.

When you need to cut the taper on your fretboard, measure and mark your lines and be VERY PRECISE. Remember 1mm is the difference between “good” and “high E string keeps falling off the fretboard when I play”, so measure twice. Get a scrap flat long board and set up the fence on your table saw and run the scrap board through just to slice a bit of the scrap board off, and DON’T change the fence. Then get some double sided tape (not the carpet kind, or you’ll never get your fretboard off the scrap!) and carefully stick the fretboard onto your scrap leaving just the bits to be cut exposed past the edge of the scrap board. Run it through the table saw (using a blade with lots of teeth, a hardwood blade will leave a nice edge) and then flip it around and cut the other side of the taper. Note: I did this before I put the frets on.

Some people snip the fret ends off the fretboard after fretting (you need some serious snippers, tin snips and wire cutters will just laugh at your measly attempts to sever the fret wire), but I use a jewelers saw. It’s quite fast and you can cut it flush, requiring only the slightest filing to smooth out the fret ends. (So they dont cut up your hands when you run your hands across the neck)

Buy a radius ed sanding block for leveling your frets. Trust me, you can’t hold anything straight enough while sanding to do a good job without serious experience and skill, and at the level of detail required for the fretboard (remember that things are measured in thousandths of an inch! Or for us metricky folks, a quarter of a mm could be the difference between a note playing and a note buzzing, and half a mm could mean the note doesn’t play at all!) rulers and “straight edges” are not straight. They’re not meant for this kind of precision, unless you buy one of the specially machined ones from Stewmac.

Go slowly.

Do the sharpie-over-the-frets and sand till the sandpaper is evenly hitting every part of every fret. This is a more complicated process than I am going to explain (which is good because I’m not great at it anyway), so make sure you read up as much as you can on it. I used Emory boards from a hobby store to file the frets back to a curve, because I couldn’t afford a crowning file. After having done that, I’ll definitely save up for a crowning file before building my next guitar.

Don’t over-clamp things when you glue things together. You can clamp too tight, and it squeezes out too much glue making the joint weaker, not stronger. You only want to clamp tightly, not freakishly, wrenchingly tight.

Use a two way truss rod. They’re a lot easier than the gibson style.

When it comes time to glue the fretboard on, do all your measuring and make sure everything is aligned perfectly. Then get a stapler and put two staples in the neck, one near the top and one near the bottom. Using some wire cutters snip the end of the staples off so you just have some little metal pokey things sticking up out of the wood. Now align your fretboard and press down really good, and seperate – this will help you line up your fretboard while gluing, and help prevent the fretboard from slipping around when you clamp it on. I used my radiused sanding block to clamp the fretboard on with even pressure.

Don’t cut corners. If you use a spade bit to drill big holes out, drill a guide hole first.

To cut the 3.5 degree angle neck plane and mortise that I decided on into the body, I built a box jig. All it is is a large box frame (four walls, no top or bottom) large enough to accommodate the guitar body, and a board that I can slide across the top, with a hole in it for the router.

Prop the box jig up on one end until the angle is what you want, and route the neck plane from the edge of the body to the neck pickup location. Cut the neck mortise (another thing you should read up on before doing and make a template and use a template bit for your router), then lower the angle a bit and route from the neck pickup location to the stop piece. These are the areas that need to stay flat for mounting hardware on.

I used the router to rough out (really rough) the top carve by laying the box flat and routing layers of “steps” onto the guitar top.

Buy a small plane and learn how to use it.

A small plane is a killer tool for smoothing out the “Steps” of the router top carve. After planing, your top will still look really rough, and this is where sanding comes in.

I worked in stages, shaping the yin and yang of the belly curve and the recurve of the top. An orbital sander with a course pad for awhile to get the belly curve, then I would switch to the drum sander in my drill press to get the “recurve”. (Aka the “Tube” around the edge, where the surface ever so slightly dips down before going up into the belly curve. If you just do the belly curve, you get a top that looks like a bubble – not very attractive.)

If you don’t have experience with it, do a couple test mortise and tenon joints on scrap wood. It is HARD.

Remember when you’re fitting them together, you’re not trying to make the tenon and the mortise perfectly square, you’re trying to make them fit each other.

To drill the tuner holes in the headstock without knocking wood out of the back of the headstock, clamp a scrap piece of wood onto the back of the headstock and drill through both. You’ll get a perfectly clean hole.

When it comes time to drill for the studs for the bridge and tailpiece, measure and drill for the tailpiece first. Install it, put the tuners on, and put on your E strings. Slip the bridge under and move the bridge around until it’s intonated as best it can be, and use a pokey thing to mark the holes where you’ll drill for the bridge studs. This way you can make sure you get it right, and your guitar will be in tune.

Do this string-up-bridge-location test after your fret leveling, because then you can also check for any glaring problems with your frets. I had to go back and spot sand a few frets.

Remember to drill a little hole from the tailpiece stud hole to the control cavity and run a ground wire BEFORE putting the stud in. Just leave a bit of bare wire exposed and hanging down into the tailpiece hole, and tap the stud in, it’ll hold it.

To get the tuner stud divot whatevers out, just take a big drill bit and put the but end in the tuner hole and gently tap them out.

If for some reason you need to get a bridge or tailpiece stud out, drop a little screw down into the hole and then put the actual tailpiece/bridge thing on and tighten it. It will hit the screw and pull the stud out of the wood. (Make sure you score the lacquer if you ever do this on a finished guitar or you’ll pull the finish up with it)

Drill all your holes for pots and switches before doing the final prep sanding. Test fit the electronics – you made need to go back and use a drill press with a spade or forstner bit on the inside of the control cavity to thin the top a bit to get the pots to come through far enough.

Use a piece of cardboard and put it on the front of your guitar and stick a pencil through the holes for the electronics and mark the positions, then poke holes in the cardboard and mount your pots on that to do all your detail soldering. This way you minimize the amount of time you have to solder in the tiny control cavity.

TEST your electronics before putting everything in and finalizing everything. Trust me, you don’t want to put it all in and find a cold solder joint somewhere hard to reach, or you wired something wrong.

I had to make a lot of tweaks to get the guitar playing the way I wanted after everything was said and done. Strings were going out of tune when fretted on the first 2 frets – this means the nut was too high, so I lowered the nut. The bridge was too high, making the action very high, and I had lowered the bridge as much as I could already. (Mental note: Draw the side view diagram to check my neck angle next time!) so I took the bridge adjusty things out and that let me drop the bridge down another 2-3 mm, and put got the action just right.

I didn’t bind the fingerboard, but I very slightly rounded the edges with some 600 grit sandpaper. VERY slightly. Then I went over the fretboard with lemon oil. Not a lot, I filled up a bottle cap and didn’t even use half of it, I just dipped a q-tip into the oil and painted it across each fret (one dip gave me enough oil for the entire first fret, or 2 of the higher up frets). Let it soak for 10 or so minutes then wipe off any excess. It will take a few days to cure and stop feeling oily (because this is an oil finish, which is different from regular oil. This oil hardens, instead of evaporating.)

What you use on your fretboard is up to your own personal choice, but gunstock oil is great and had I had any of that I’d have used that instead.

Finishing notes:

Fill up the sink with warm water (warm, not hot) and put your can of lacquer in to warm up. This will really help with getting a good spray – as long as you don’t take this warm can and spray it into a cold room. Then you’re sabotaging yourself. lol

Hang the guitar by one of the tuner holes, or screw an eyelet into the bottom strap button hole.

Many, many light coats, instead of heavy coats. Trust me on this. Even if it doesn’t drip or sag when you spray it on, Lacquer is sneaky. Because each layer you spray melts into the previous layer, you can spray a coat and think it’s not too heavy because it didn’t drip, then you go away and it melts the last layer a little bit and snowballs, and you come back to find a big drip or sag later. >.<

You can use Nitro lacquer over Acrylic lacquer as long as the acrylic has fully cured. Cured, not dried.

While masking the rosewood fingerboard before each coat of lacquer, I also masked the area where the nut will be – this is because superglue is commonly used to attach the nut, and superglue contains Cyanoacrylate, and CA does not get along with Lacquer. (So make sure you don’t have any ugly bits of superglue visible where the fingerboard meets the neck if you glued your frets in. If there’s any superglue peeking out from under the masking tape, the lacquer won’t go over the superglue and you’ll have to sand that area out and refinish it.

If you use a water based dye, then it’s a good idea to do your finish sanding up to 600 grit, then wipe the surface with a damp rag and let it dry thoroughly. Then very lightly sand against the grain with 600 grit or higher to knock off the raised grain. This will give you a smoother surface after you dye the guitar.

Not having spraying equipment, I opted to use water based aniline dye to colour the guitar top. I mixed an amber-yellow I liked and went over the top with a dye rag, then I mixed a darker outside colour and went around the edges defining the burst. Then I used the amber rag to blend the colours, always pushing from light to dark.

That’s about it for finishing notes as I’m pretty bad at it.

Related posts:

1. Building My Guitar Pt. 3
2. Guitar Building Pt. 4: Drippy
3. Guitar Building Pt. 2
4. Building a Guitar
5. Custom Wound Guitar Pick Pickup