Migration

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Pick Up Routs

There's not a lot of major jobs left to do before we start the top carve. We'll tackle one of those today by finishing the pickup routes.

I set the neck and fretboard up, and added the pickup ring to check where it would go. I've got a pair of 'ebay special' humbuckers I keep in the workshop for placement and measuring for these situations:

The pickups will be routed at the neck angle. I placed the router template on the part of the body which has the neck angle plane on it. This was supported at the other end by placing a couple of offcuts between it and the body.

Here's the neck pickup after a couple of shallow passes with the router:

And as the depth increases, we break through the maple top into the mahogany - here we can see the copper foil which we used earlier to shield the channel between the switch cavity and control cavity.

I found a lot of sources about how deep these should be on a '59. They all seemed to be just over an inch deep. I routed the main part of the pickup to 27mm.

To rout the 'ears' of the pickup, I set the router up with a fence. This meant that between the fence and the follower bearing, the router would be trapped so that it could only move in the 'ear' section of the pickup template. I routed the ears to 37mm.

Here's the pickup with the template still attached:

I did similar for the bridge pickup, and sat the pickups and rings in place:

Here's the view of the neck pickup rout. The tenon from the neck needs to be cut off, as it's currently too long, protuding into the rout:

The next logical step is to start with the body carve. I marked with a pencil the sections of the body the parts that I don't want to sand - the top (for now) and the bottom 'layer', which will eventually have a bit of a recurve on it and will remain flat until then:

I attacked the body with sandpaper, and the robosander (mounted in my hand drill):

 Maple is pretty hard and takes a lot of work to sand. I could use bladed tools like spokeshaves, thumb planes or gouges, but I am happy to take this slowly and sandpaper will also be significantly lower risk:

I'll get this a little closer to the final shape, at which point the binding will go on.

Bridge Plane carve

There are two major pieces of work remaining on the body before we start working on the top carve. The first is the bridge plane. 

Here's a comment from a recent Texas Toast video, by Lou Moritz (who I believe has built for Tony Iommi...), which describes the plane on top of a Les Paul far more simply than I could: 

First off, I marked carefully where I wanted the bridge plane to begin and end. The area between the back of the fretboard and the far end of the bridge pickup rout will be joined by a 1.2 degree angle: 

And propped the body up in the router box at the correct 1.2 degree angle. I used an app on my phone to measure this angle - it won't have been exact but it was certainly the most accurate way I had to hand of making the angle: 

Then I very slowly and carefully routed away the centre of the guitar, to creep up on those 'start' and 'stop' lines I'd marked to outline the plane. The 'high point' of this cut - i.e. the piece of material that gets removed first is apporximately in the middle of the guitar body:

Her you can see how little material was removed in each pass - the pencil lines have been removed by the router skimming over the top of the body. I lowered the router bit by about a quarter of a turn of its stop each pass - it's a really tiny sliver each time to completely minimise the chance of any tear out on the top:

Eventually, I'd made the plane I wanted, and from the side the body now looks like this - just about visible is the 4.5 degree neck plane and the 1.2 degree bridge plane:

I had had a lot of trouble visualising this cut, and practiced before making it. This was my practice cut, which was waaay off. I think I might have cried had this happened to the real thing!

Next up I remarked the position of the bridge (628.65 mm / 24.75 Freedom Units):

And hogged out the material for the pickup cavities based on where they'd sit relative to the bridge and end of the fretboard:

I'll tidy up the pickup cavities next time, and then move onto the top carve. Once that's finalised, the only job left on the body will be the binding

Neck Carve - rough shaping

In the last session I made a very rough pass at the first fret carve. The neck carve is simple to visualise - carve the shape you want at the first and 12th fret, then join those two up with straight lines.

I started up by finalising the shape at the first fret, referring constantly to my template until:

The template was from guitarsandwood, who have some great products for those in Europe.

I started at the 12th fret:

Until:

This is the shape of the neck at this point:

The neck step is to join both of those carved portions with a straight line. First I hog out the material in between with a spoke shave:

Once most of the material is removed, you can turn to a sanding beam to remove the rest. Unfortunately, my sanding beam is too long for the job:

So, I make a new one out of MDF, planing a straight edge into an offcut:

And hardening up the edge by soaking it in CA glue - I did this outside as it's incredibly aggressive in terms of fumes:

Before adding sandpaper to the edge:

And moving onto the neck to join those two carved portions up:

As usual, I add some chalk to the sections to carve away so I can monitor progress:

Here we can see that there's a low point in the right hand side, where the levelling beam does not touch the neck - this needs a little more work:

Until:

Eventually, both sides are roughed out. This is a long way fro finished, but it's good enough for now for a rough shape:

Once the neck is done, I moved onto the heel. I marked out a circular shape for the heel by drawing around a tin I had in the shed:

And started to file down towards it:

By now I'd been manually sanding for a couple of hours and was bored of it. Always a dangerous move, I reached for the power tools....

And started working, attentively, on the heel:

Until it was also roughed out:

And the whole neck:

The neck is only, at this point, rough carved. There's clearly a great deal of work left on it, but for now all the work at the lowest grits has been done. I'll come back to this in a couple of weeks.

I offered the new neck up to the body:

And put the whole guitar together:

Next up, I'll start to look at the body again. The most significant piece of work left on it is to rout the bridge plane, which is an intimidating piece of work, as it involves using the router on the body again...

More fretboard finishing

I'm several weeks behing updating here! The next couple of posts will catch up :]

There was one piece of binding left on the fretboard. I chopped a thin piece to size for the end: 

Which when fitted will look like this:

Before I added it, I wanted to sand the side bindings down and do a little extra shaping of the fretboard:

The fretboard is now at it's final shape. That means:

- It is straight end to end;
- The radius is constant all along it's length; and
- The centre of the radius it along the middle of the fretboard all along it's length

The fret slots were slightly gummed up with CA glue from when I put on the binding strips. I used my fret slot cleaning tool to scrape the inside of the slots. This is an aggressive tool, and needs to be used carefully, especially given the amount of work in the fretboard to this point:

The piece of end binding I'd cut earlier wasn't quite tall enough to cover the highest point of the fretboard in the middle. I cut a piece of taller binding:

While the CA glue appears to have been very good at sticking the binding on the sides of the fretboard, I wondered if it might not work as well on the endgrain. To give it a bit of help I scored the end of the fretboard:

And the binding:

And glued them together:

After a few minutes the glue was set up well enough that I could use my fret nippers to snip the binding to the same radius as the fretboard:

Yielding a fully bound fretboard:

There's still a little CA staining on the board which will need to be sanded out, as well as sanding the board to a higher finished grit. These will be covered in the future, but for now the board can be considered complete.


I had a little time so thought I'd make a start on the neck carve. Whilst this is one of the most enjoyable stages of the build, I am always concerned about taking the neck too thin, running the risk of 'carving' through into the truss rod channel. I took measurements to make sure I knew what thickness I could go to, and what tolerances I had. You can also see in this photo my new LP neck template thing - showing what the neck should look like at the 1st, 7th and 12th frets.

I marked the centre line, and the 1st and 12th frets. My general rule is that (assuming you thicknessed your neck blank to the right thickness) the centre line should never be touched - at the end of the carve the line should still be visible. This will mean that the back of your neck is stll as straight as it was when you thicknesses the neck. 

This shows how the template will be used at the first fret:

And as the carve proceeds: 

I started chalking the template heavily:

Then pressing it against the neck:

Which showed where it touched the wood, and which bits have to be removed next:

This is a slower method than my usual - where I just free hand the shape, but in this instance I am keen to replicate a 'traditional' carve shape.

I didn't do much carving before running out of time, but here's the neck components together: