Les Paul - Body shaping

After cutting it oversize, I started to get the mahogany in shape. In the past I've run a router over the template, using a follower bearing on it.

This has worked fine, but it's easy to tilt the router sometimes - especially on the guitar's horn or somewhere where there's not much template surface to offer support. This leads to nicks in the guitar edge. With a painted guitar, no problem - fill it, sand and cover with paint. This guitar will not be painted so there's nowhere to hide. Therefore, I decided to use a different tool.

I'll be using my robo sander, which is a small drum sander mounted in a pillar drill, with a follower bearing. The guitar template is attached to the body:

And offered up to the bearing:

You then run the sander against the body until the bearing hits the template, at which point you're done. 

Make sure you have dust extraction :)

This yields this finish:

I also have a finer grit sleeve to tidy it up more. This is a nicer finish than a router, and it's a method which appears to be lower risk, more predictable, quieter and (with dust extraction) cleaner, albeit slower. I'll use this in the future for this step instead of the router. 

One other downside to using the robo sander is that it'll wear out your pillar drill - they apparently don't like sideways pressure being applied to them. 

The body is about half done, I'll finish up the shaping in the next couple of days 

Les Paul - Body Routs

It's pretty simple stuff at this stage, just following similar steps as those carried out in my earlier telecaster build.

I wanted to finish off the internal routing of the mahogany prior to putting the maple on top. Probably unnecessary but I first drilled out a bit of the wood from the channel that connects the pickup toggle cavity to the main control cavity:

Then set up a fence from an offcut, attached using masking tape / superglue and routed the channel out:

Yielding:

Next up, I tidied up the control cavities. They'd been drilled out using forstner bits, but weren't at their final size yet. The template was reattached to the body, and a follower bit used to route both the control cavity and selector switch cavity out.

First I used a top bearing, running against the template:

Yielding:

However, my router bit isn't long enough to reach all the way through the guitar, so I flipped the body over and used a bottom bearing bit to finish off the cut (it runs against the shape already routed):

The control cavities are now finished. From the front:

And back:

Now, all the body routs are done. I'd been leaving the mahogany slab in one piece as it makes it easier to work on and gives the router a larger, more stable base to sit on. Now, however, it's time to make it guitar shaped. 

On my cheapo bandsaw at least, it's tricky to cut accurately to a line without veering *too* close to or over it. I traced around the outside of the template using a small washer as a spacer: 

This gives a second line which will be used as a visual aid:

You can then cut right up to this line on the bandsaw, without stressing too much about touching it or going over it a little. My bandsaw is a hobby grade tool, which is close to it's limit cutting through wood this thick :]. I make plenty of relief cuts as I go:

Especially in the tighter curves - where my saw lacks the horsepower to make turns :)

At the end of this, we see the body approaching its final shape: 

At the end of my last post, I said that I hoped the body would weigh somewhere around 3lbs (1360 grams):

With a few more shavings to come off around the outside here it is weighing in at 3.05lbs :)

New Guitar build - Les Paul

Short break from building, during which time I build a new workshop :)

Got a new pillar drill :) 

And build a hideous les paul prototype, an eight piece pine body, with a bookmatched mdf top:

This was a prototype built using a load of jigs I've been working on to get the top carve, neck angle, headstock angle etc correct. I'll show these in the coming weeks and months. 

I've used the Scott Wilkinson (link) and Gil Yarons (link) build threads as the reference for this build, and a lot of the jigs are straight up copies of theirs.

This is going to be a traditional looking Les Paul, some kind of vintage sunburst (not decided what exactly yet, and I've noticed that the more you look, the less you can decide...). The wood came a couple of weeks ago:

It's a AAA mahogany body, AAA rosewood fingerboard, AAA maple top. The top in particular is ludicrous, and was quite expensive. It's for that reason that so many more jigs will be used on this project than I'd usually bother with:

I'd already had the body thickness sanded to 45 mm, my first job was to joint the edge of the body, and glued the pieces together:

Then I set about weight relief. I've owned an (Epiphone) Les Paul in the past, and the main thing I remember about it was that it was cripplingly heavy. This guitar will be heavily weight relieved to avoid that. There appear to be three methods Gibson have used in the past:

I'll be using the 'Chambered Less Paul', which I believe was used on all or most Standards in the early 2000s. I cut a router template:

And started to hog out the weight relief chambers with forstner bits:

Then the router to tidy it all up:

Here's the body following the work: 

The obvious question is how much weight did I manage to remove by doing this. Including the control cavity rough cuts, this removed about a pound of wood from the body. It currently weighs just under five pounds, but there's a lot of wood to remove to get it to it's final shape. I'm hoping it should weigh in around 3 pounds (without the maple top) once complete.