[geordie accent]Day 3 in the Les Paul building house[/geordie accent]
Well, we got another weekend's work on the guitars. I suspect that we did things a bit in the wrong order, but it seems to be turning out quite well so far. (touch wood)
Our first job was to put a 4.5 degree angle on the front of the guitar. This gives the 4.5 degree neck angle. It was a bit of a head scratcher as to how we would do this accurately. We ended up building a jig for the router.
Then we routed the pickup cavities. For this, we bought an acrylic template from stewart macdonald.
At this point, we should have routed the mortice for the neck tenon while the top was still flat. We never thought about it though and went straight on with carving the top. Most of this was done with a spokeshave and cleaned up with a ROS. We scribed a line all the way round witha mortice gauge. This was the lowest point of the carve.
The veritas low angle spokeshave did a very good job. Matyn's guitar has some very awkward grain and a large knot, so it took him much longer to carve his. He ended up just wasting as much wood as he could with the router and some very course sandpaper. It turned out well in the end though. It's quite difficult to see the carve in these photos.
We made some MDF templates for routing the cavities in the back for the electrics.
Then of course, we discovered that we should have routed the neck mortise whie the top was flat. Luckily we had our 4.5 degree jig and we made a temple to sit on it.
After drilling the holes for the pots an the switch, this is what they looked like.
Then, on to the neck. We didn't get very far with the necks as time ran out. We got them roughed out on the bandsaw, routed the truss rod slot and cut the neck tenon.
All in all, we are very pleased with the progress. but we are amazed that nothing has gone horribly wrong yet. This is how they looked at the end of the today.
Next time, we will be finishing the neck and hopefully getting onto the binding and inlaying.
Cheers for looking.