Starting the scarf joint

With the body waiting for a neck to start to test fit bits, it's time to make a start on the neck blank.

I sanded this to 80 grit using leveling beams. Progress pictures not necessary...

It's important as you level a face to make sure that it is straight in all planes. That is to say, end to end along its length, across the short face (at multiple points) and also from corner to corner (to check for twist). Once I'm done sanding, I check these planes. Here's the longest:

It was all good. 

Next it's time to prepare what will become the scarf joint at the headstock. Traditionally, necks are often made out of a single, thick piece of mahogany without a joint. However, they can be prone to this breakage as a result: 

Here's a diagram illustrating why:

So, first I measure the angle of the headstock on my template (16 degrees):

Then I try to dial the same angle into my bandsaw:

I couldn't get enough angle on the table to cut it this way... but this way looks possible...

However, my little bandsaw can't get enough blade to make that cut:

So, nothing to do but smash it out using handsaws:

Yielding this:

Once these two are put together, you get one of my favourite moments in making the neck, when it actually starts to resemble something :] 

You can see how the whole neck starts to look when placed next to the template:

The faces of the scarf joint are messy and need tidying, especially given the saws used to cut them. I had already made a jig for this part of the process. I copied the jig used by David Fletcher (epic LPJ build here). 

The edges of the sloped section of the jig match the headstock angle and are first used as a guide for a long (number seven) plane to hog out the protruding material:

Ideally you should just use a plane for this step, but my tiny workshop makes it relatively difficult to get a comfortable planing position with a number seven. I decided to use abrasives to finish off the job, by running a sanding sledge on the jig:

Until we approach completion:

There's another ten minutes needed on the scarf joint faces, but they're very close to being done. Next up will be to build up the area around the heel of the guitar (where my mahogany is not thick enough - see the picture above with the template) and then to glue it all up. 

Pickup plane carve

I routed the pickup plane into the body. This is a plane at the same angle as the neck angle, between the neck pocket and the first pickup route. In my case, the neck angle will be four degrees. 

First step is to prepare the router box to route at an angle.

I attached a pair of four degree wedges that I made onto the base of the router box, making sure they were parallel to the centre line, and positioned at the same point longitudinally in the box:

To this, I attached the guitar body. It's obviously important to make sure that the body is parallel to the wedges, which is done by lining the centre line up with the centre line of the router box at the back:

And at the front:

I then marked the wood to be removed, up to a line which marks the location of the neck pickup:

Then I make small passes with the router, removing a fraction at a time. It is key at this point to go slowly, as any tears or chip outs on the top will be visible and cannot be repaired invisibly. After a couple of router passes, we creep up on the line:

And a bit closer...

... closer...

Until we're done. We've now finished carving the pickup plane at the required angle. There is one more plane to carve, between the top of the the pickup plane and the bridge. However, I'm not sure how to work out the angle of this one so I'm putting it off for now.

This carve removed another 40 grams or so :]

Body carve begins

Time to start the most intimidating part of the build so far - the top carve. I'd love to be able to attack this with gouges and do the whole thing manually. However, I lack both the patience to sharpen my gouges properly and the skill to use them to carve a good result :]

Instead I'll be using a set of top carve router templates. I use the ones from ExNihilo (Scott Wilkinson) on the My Les Paul forums, here:

http://www.mylespaul.com/threads/new-and-improved-carve-templates.384930/

These will give a rough shape, after which I'll use scrapers, sandpaper and planes to get it smooth.

I've already practised using these on my MDF topped guitar. Scott recommends 1.6mm depth for each successive route. First, I quickly flatten the top of the guitar in the middle - all the other areas will be carved away shortly so there's no point in worrying too much in getting it completely flat:

You can see how the top wasn't level here: 

Yielding a flat area in the middle of the guitar. All the surface around the edge will be sacrificed in the upcoming steps:

Next I attach the first of the seven templates:

And start hogging out the area around the edge using a follower bit on the router. Annoyingly, there are two little bits right around the edge of the body that my router cannot reach - the base hits the edge of the router box first:

The templates are progressively smaller:

Until the last is reached:

You can see the marks I used to measure the depth of the router bits, each one 1.6mm deeper than the one above:

Once the routing was complete, I attacked the blocks that the router couldn't reach with the number seven Stanley plane:

Until the top carve is fully roughed out:

The maple top has, at this point, not yet been flush cut with the mahogany, and there are overhangs all around the body:

As before, I ran the body through the robo sander, using the mahogany body to run the follower bearing along so: 

This yielded an (almost) fully shaped body:

It needs another five minutes on the robo sander, but is close to its final form. 

The routing went well - it was a fairly stressful session, as the wood is expensive and any mistakes could easily affect the final finish. In fact, there was one small chip out: 

It's on the fourth layer up, towards the back of the body. I'm hoping that I'll be able to sand this out - this part of the body is behind the bridge, so should be able to be sanded down to any level that looks good, without affecting the instrument.

Finally, I weighed the body. It was previously 2,700 grams. The routing has so far removed 500 grams of maple (or, to put it another way, about £45 :S ). The body with the rough carved cap currently weighs in at 2,200grams, or five lbs. There's a little more wood to come off with the neck pocket, pickup routes and neck and bridge plane. However, this is still far heavier than I'd like, given it's only the body, but at this stage, there's now very little I can do about it!

The next step will be to rout in the two body planes - one at the next angle (around four degrees) between the heel and the first pickup, the other around 1.5 degrees between that one and the bridge.

After that I'll probably call it a day on the body for now, and start work on the neck. I'd like to get the two fitting together accurately before I worry too much about the binding, carve finishing and pickup routes (on the body side) and the fretboard, and headstock details (on the neck side).

Les Paul - cap on

I did quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.

Following its final visit to the robo sander, the guitar body looked like this:

The next step is to prepare and attach the maple cap to the body. I jointed the edges, and glued and clamped the maple:

You can see here that the maple had warped along it's length - whilst the two ends of the joint were flat across the surface, the middle had a protruding edge. This needs to be dealt with before it can be attached to the rest of the body:

I only needed to get one side of the wood flat -  the side that will attach to the mahogany. The other side will be subjected to the top carve, so there's no point in making sure it's absolutely flat / parallel to the bottom. I attacked the surface with planes, scrapers and a sanding beam. In the end, the surface was quite significantly uneven, and the quickest way to flatten it was using the router:

This was done with great care. It would have been safer to have done it by hand which was a major consideration giving the haunting cost of this piece of maple :) However, the uneven grain of the maple made for frequent tear outs, and the lack of space in my workshop made this particular operation annoyingly cramped. 

Once done, the surface was fairly flat, I finished it off with a sanding beam. Covering the surface in pencil lines before sanding allows one to see where the low spots are:

Where the pencil remains is a low spot, so more sanding is required:

Eventually, I got it flat. Maple is much harder to work with than mahogany :( 

I can now locate the cap into its place on the mahogany. Given that both the mahogany and the maple have a centre line where they were joined, it's easy to line them up using that. It's also useful to get some screws into the pickup routs for gluing, as they'll be able to provide clamping pressure in the middle of the body. The screws holes don't matter in this part of the guitar, as that area will be excavated for the pickups.

I already had a pair of screw holes in the mahogany which I'd used for the router template; to locate these into the maple, I put a couple of small pins in the holes:

Then put the maple cap in place before pushing it down. The pins left little divots:

Which I could use to drill out the maple. These screws will be used shortly, when we glue the body.

Before gluing the top to the mahogany, there's one job left, which is to shield the channel between the pickup switch and the control cavity. There's no way to get at this once the top is glued in, so it has to be done now. 

I like to use copper tape rather than conductive paint, just for the colour and effect in the cavities - I like to think of it as a little surprise for anyone working on the guitar in the future :). I lined the back of the maple:

Using the position of the mahogany cavities to check it was lined up correctly:

And also lined the cavity in the mahogany:

Close up. It took more than one piece of tape to cover the width of the channel:

So I had to drop little solder blobs on the tape to keep the Faraday effect working. These look really messy, but no-one will ever see them :) :

One last look at the separate pieces before they're glued:

And a note of the date and serial number in the guitar:

And the blank is glued:

I made sure to check that there were no glue runs in the internal cavities. Were any glue to harden, then drop off or get dislodged somehow, it would rattle around in there with no way of ever removing it.

In addition to the screws in the pickup routs, I also used a couple of clamps...

A few hours later...

I weighed it out of interest. Somewhat surprised to see that the maple cap has doubled the weight. Fortunately there's a lot of that that will be removed in the upcoming carving process.

Next step, will be to rough out the top carve...