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).