The Blank Finally Arrived!

Whew! It took a while, but my alder blank arrived in the mail today. It came as a two piece glued together, and should provide a nice sound.

I did notice a few hairline cracks along the grain on the edges. That was to be expected, so I ordered the blank 2" longer than I needed. I covered up the edges with a little mixture of wood glue and water to seal it up and prevent further crackage as the humidity of the air changes (advice of my father).

Pretty excited to get my drawing finalized and start cutting and routing!

The Neck Arrived!

Super duper excited! Just received a 2011 Fender Jazzmaster neck, and it's looking great! No fret wear, and no scratches! I compared the neck to my dad's 1982 Fender Bullet, and the neck scale and thickness is about the same, so it will be nice to play on a familiar scale once I'm done with the project. Can't wait to start the real work on this guitar!

Tuners included! A great thing to already have, and cuts down the cost of the guitar.

Just look at the texture of that rosewood!

I'll oil up the fretboard soon when I get some of that Dunlop 65 lemon oil.

Computers Rock!

The scale of the cardboard cutout wasn't good enough. The neck's scale length of the cutout measured up to about 26", not even close to the 24.75" scale the Alt De Facto has. So, when discussing my guitar with my dad, he recommended I use AutoCAD to draw out the guitar with the proper dimensions so that I could have it printed out at full scale. And I did just that:

I used an image I found online of the guitar, and used the polyline tool to outline all the important parts of the guitar. Now, I won't be using the same neck as the Alt De Facto, but instead I will use a neck from a Fender Jazzmaster. Yeah, I know, I'm not truly building the guitar from scratch, but having the small amount of woodworking experience that I have, a neck would just be too difficult to make from scratch. There are still a few things to add into the drawing to make it my own guitar, as this is simply a copy of the Alt De Facto.

Ok, from now on, all posts will be written in the present tense (as much as possible), since I will be writing the posts right after I complete whatever I am writing about.

The First Step

So, it was Summer.

Yeah.

Time to start this project, and not put it off, like I do with all my projects.

But this time, I really did start the project, if only by surfing the internet. I sort of still liked my design, but not really, and then I stumbled across this, and man did I want it in that color:

The non-reverse Gibson Firebirds are gorgeous guitars. Just look at those P-90 pickups all in a row! But they're way out of my price range... and I still want to build my own guitar anyways.

Then, I found this guitar by Fano, the Alt De Facto PX6, which has a cooler, more angular shape:

And then, this was born:

My very own cardboard cutout of the guitar that I wanted to build. I had since forgotten about the design I had made. I really wanted this guitar. Maybe someday I'll build another one using my design. At this point, though, I knew that this project was going to become a reality.

Oh, and I want one of these as a tailpiece too:

The Project

Ok, so I'm a little late creating this blog, since I have already started the project. I have been playing my father's 1983 Fender Bullet for about a year or so, and now I really want a guitar of my own to toy around with. So, I figured, why not build one? Shouldn't be that hard, right? Yeah, sure. We'll see how it comes out, and hopefully I can get some help from my father, Ray Hunt, who has decent woodworking skills.

I went at it on graphing paper, designing my own guitar. At first I came up with this:

Yuck.

After a while I came up with this and was much more satisfied: 

Much better. I knew I wanted a somewhat skewed guitar with maybe humbuckers or humbucker sized pickups. Then, I let the drawings be, and waited until Summer, until I would really have time for the project.