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:
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:
Then the router to tidy it all up:
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:
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.
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