Re-Routing...

Short update today!

I got around to routing out the wire passage between the pickup cavity and the switch cavity today!

Unfortunately, there was a little weirdness happening on one side of the cut, probably due to the template guide slipping off the template, but fortunately this part will be covered by the pickguard, so it won't even be noticeable.

I'm Sick of Waiting!

        So, as you can see, it has been a long time since I worked on my guitar. I never seemed to have any time (with college apps and all). But it was time to strip the strings off of the guitar and begin working. I finally decided (with the help of a friend) that I just need to work a little bit per day. Just make it my daily routine to get home from school, go downstairs and work on the guitar to unwind, and then do my homework. Simple. So here's what I did on Monday and today.

I sanded the cavities down with a dremel tool to get the pesky flakes off. The flakes were quite large, which is why I went for the dremel tool first before hand sanding.

I need to make an additional passageway for wires behind where the pickguard will be, so today I made another router template.

The wires need to be able to go from the pickup cavity to the switch cavity.

So, the template will lay over the body something like this to allow the router to cut a passageway.

I truly am sorry (both for myself and for everyone who is eager to see a finished product) for not finishing this guitar earlier. I hope you all will enjoy an update every day or so that documents the small progress I make each day.

Finally...

Heh, putting strings on a guitar has an odd effect to it. I ended up wanting to play the unfinished guitar a lot more than I actually wanted to finish it. And that happened for about a month. But today, I finally set back down to work again. After a month of playing, I decided that even with the recessed bridge posts, the action was still too high.

Sorry. I had to.

So, I decided to recess the bridge into the body. Eh, not the typical thing to do with tune-o-matic bridges, but it has to be done to get the guitar to be playable. It wasn't until I researched Gibson style guitars that I realized what I was getting myself into using a tune-o-matic bridge with a fender neck. Here are a few pics from stewmac.com that explains it better than I ever could.

Fender

Gibson

So the bridge design is higher on a Gibson than a Fender. Huh. Well, that means I need to lower the bridge into the body. So, I dismounted the neck (again) and pulled out the bridge hardware.

I started out by making a template to route out the body so that the bridge would fit.

Then I routed the cavity out.

Then I re-seated the bridge. Easy as pie!