All Maple Build.

[WRGKMC]

Body cut and sanded, Neck Routed ready for installing hardware. This is what I call a basic meat and potatoes build using the simplest of hand tools. This should show you, you don't need ultra high end tools to do the job, just careful planning and thinking ahead. The body was made from antique maple shelving, that probably 100 years old according to my buddy who gave me the wood. He does antique restorations for a living and scrounged it from one of his jobs.

 

 

Aligning the bridge and tailpiece to the neck. Botch this and it will never be right.

 

 

Getting the scale length set so the saddles can be properly adjusted. Tape helps as a guide.

This is where accurate measurement are ultra-critical.

 

 

Drill bit used first with tape as a depth marker.

 

 

Then used a dremil to enlarge the holes.

My dremil bits are pretty worn out from all the builds I’ve done.

 

 

Next comes measuring and routing the pickup holes.

 

[WRGKMC]

I use old hack saw blades taped down as routing limiters. This is very hard maple and the dremil tends to skip around so having that protection is very important.

 

 

Here I use a drill bit first.

 

 

Then I use a router bit.

 

 

I check the hole frequently to be sure it will fit without binding. Here I’m getting close.

 

 

Next comes the control plate. I like having my volume control accessible in a straight line with the bridge

 

 

Again I do the tape and hack saw blade trick.

 

 

A little Swiss cheese.

 

 

[gardo]

This is great another build to follow . Thanks

[WRGKMC]

Next a clean sweep of the cavity.

 

 

Can’t forget the pickup wires. I elected to do this the easy way coming in from the neck pocket.

 

 

Next I have the parts set in place and it begins to take shape.

 

 

Still have to finish it. I figured with the orange lacquered neck a Tung oil finish on Maple would be best.

Hung the body and applied the Tung oil with a sponge brush and avoided getting bubbles.

 

 

Here it is after about 10 coats or so. You can see Tung oil will build up much like Lacquer and can actually be much more durable. It’s just a bitch getting the last coat super smooth. You’re good for one pass on a coat. Trying to do two passes with a wet brush causes streaks so you have to load the brush up and let it flow, but not too much where you get drips for a thick finish like I’m going for.

 

 

Here’s the final results. This one wound up being a super solid player. Not as heavy as you’d think for a solid maple guitar.

I skipped some picks on simple stuff. I did use a long cannon style plug, the kind you can use on acoustic guitars (without the strap extension) on this one. It made it easier to just drill a hole up to the cavity and install it instead of using a jack plate.

 

 

 

If you want to hear how it wound up sounding you can hear it here.

It does get that Johnny Winter tone happening with those mini Humbuckers.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...BMaster%5D.wav

[Preacher]

Wow, pretty cool. Love the hacksaw blades as router guides.

 

Tung oil really makes the wood pop, even from distance you can see how it lights up the wood.

[WRGKMC]

Wow, pretty cool. Love the hacksaw blades as router guides.

 

Tung oil really makes the wood pop, even from distance you can see how it lights up the wood.

 

Lacquer or Poly would have left the wood much whiter looking. The Tung oil has allot of varnishes in it and has a yellow tint to make it look more vintage. Most people just do the wipe on, wipe off thing to give guitars that raw wood look, but you can lay it on thick like I did to get that high gloss look.

 

Like I said, the tough part is getting it on smooth. You can sand between coats to remove flaws but I did very little of that. I found the sponge brushes work best. Regular brushes leave too many brush marks, but with the sponges, you can load them up and make a very wet stroke, enough to leave a smooth surface but not enough to drip. I buy like 10 of them for $5 and use a new one for each coat, they way you aren't dealing with something tacky that leaves streaks.

 

I've also used Tung oil over Lacquer before too. I've done a few refinish jobs were the frets didn't need replacing. Trying to get the lacquer off a fretboard with the frets still in there doesn't work very well so I focused on getting rid of the major flaws so it was all smooth off all the old lacquer completely off down to wood, I'd just get rid of any chips or scratches then apply the Tung over the lacquer. It gave the neck a vintage look and wound up being very durable.

[Freeman Keller]

Nice thread, thanks.

[billybilly]

Wow, very cool, looks and sounds great. How would you describe the sound and what does it weigh?

[wankdeplank]

Wow' date=' very cool, looks and sounds great. How would you describe the sound and what does it weigh?[/quote']

This^ Love to hear some clips. I had a maple bodied Silvertone Silhouette of some kind from the 60's that sounded bitchen with the DeArmond foil pickups. Big mistake letting that one go.

 

Excellent work on the build, it looks beautiful.

[DeepEnd]

Nice build. It turned out like it can't decide whether it wants to be a Telecaster or a Les Paul. Possibly the best of both plus the trapeze tailpiece.

[Radar-Love]

WooHoo!!!

 

As far as appearance goes, your Les Tele kinda reminds me of my thin-bodied, all-maple, Gibson L6-S.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[WRGKMC]

Wow' date=' very cool, looks and sounds great. How would you describe the sound and what does it weigh?[/quote']

 

Its not a light weight, but its not as heavy as you'd think either. The neck is pretty beefy and very stable. I put 18:1 Grover tuners on it so the tuning is very fine. The sound will have a solid jangle like my Rickenbacker does when set for clean (my Ric has a maple body) and has a smooth and aggressive tone as you crank it up. Its warmer sounding than you may think maple may be but it doesn't have the sub lows other woods have like mahogany and rosewood. The Pickups do filter that out as well.

 

Overall its extremely solid and simple and it just hits the tones I like most for allot of material I play. I'd say the only drawback is the stock medium jumbo frets that came with the neck. (which is probably worth $100 and scored on EBay for $20 with shipping) The fret material is excellent and anyone used to them would love them. Its just I do allot of string bends playing and prefer super jumbo frets. I will likely re-fret the neck with them at some later date but they show very little wear at this point.

 

I should also mention I glued the neck in and bolted it to obtain maximum sustain. This does make it harder to re-fret but the tone did benefit from this decision.

 

The TOM and Tail make it easy to tweak and I like the Tail suspension for strings. The string distance between the bridge and tail does add some overtones when its cranked and having less downward pressure using a tail vs a stop tail allows the string to slide on the saddles and come back to pitch when you bend notes. This one also has a Brass Bridge for maximum sustain.

[Freeman Keller]

WR... a couple of questions if you don't mind. Both my son and I are in the process of building drop top set neck guitars and I only have plans for carved tops. What is your neck angle? Does the neck stand proud of the body and if so, how much? How did you route the neck pocket (with a Dremel and hacksaw blades?)? In fact, I'd like to see how you made the body with minimal tools - I find that a band saw and full sized router are pretty useful.

 

You said you both glued and bolted the neck - that seems to eliminate the advantage of each method. Comments? When I look at the picture of you marking the bridge location it doesn't look to be slanted - is that Fender scale or Gibson scale and did you add any compensation?

 

Not picking nits, I try to learn from everyone's methods.

[WRGKMC]

No Problem. I didn't take pictures of cutting the body with a hand held Jigsaw, or sanding it with an electric sander.

 

I normally route the neck pocket with a dremil router bit, but my dremil is on its last legs and needs a kick start to get spinning even with new brushes. My drummer does Antique restorations for a living and comes by on a regular basis to my studio to record. I measured out how deep the pocket needed to be and he pulled his router in from the back of his truck and knocked it out in a few minutes. We did the sides while we were at it instead of having square sides. I did let him do the neck pocket because he is highly talented with a router.

 

I did the sides which was pretty easy. It only got away from me a little on the tail where it goes against the grain and marred the top a little which was easily sanded away. I didn't take any pictures of all that. We had consumed a 12 pack at that point and I didn't think to take pics.

 

As far as the neck angle goes, the pocket was flat and we measured the depth up to the fretboard. Tilting the pocket could have done with a hand router if I had an inclined plane to lay on the body top. That would have been most difficult using a hand router in that's situation.

 

Instead I used another technique I developed along time ago. Instead of shimming the neck, I use a number of thin washers on the neck heel screws and add enough to get the tilt I need for the bridge height. I do this after partial assembly so the bridge is mounted and adjusted a few turns above the body and using a straight edge on the fret board. I get the tilt so the bridge isn't bottomed out with no strings on. Then when I do string it up, the bridge will need obviously need to be raised to have the strings clear the frets.

 

From there I can Tape the strings, loosen them, remove the neck and add or remove a washer or two to get the exact tilt needed.

 

There are other ways of doing this too. You can copy the micro tilt thing using a molly bolt or Allen screw and bolt in back of the neck plate. I have a strat with one of those and I'm not a fan of it.

 

After I get the tilt right using the washers, I remove the neck and crazy glue the washers right where they were around the heel screws. Next I mix up some epoxy putty and build in an inclined plane, a wedge of epoxy putty beginning from none at the edge of the body working up in height to equal the washers up to the pocket heel. The putty wound up being about 2~3mm thick at the heel.

 

I use a small 3" putty knife to trowel it in smooth. I would have already applies masking or clear packing tape to the heel of the neck, then I wang it down tight into the pocket so the screws squeeze the putty flat. I also make sure the neck is in alignment when I do this because some of the putty squeezes up around the sides if there's a gap. I remove the neck within about 10 minuites before its fully hard and check and see if theres any hills that need sanding or valleys that need filling. A little overage is OK.

 

I then reset the neck and let the wedge harden about an hour or two and make sure the tilt is right.

 

Its usually a little high from the excess, so I remove the neck and sand the epoxy. This is why I prefer this technique. You can sand the epoxy dead flat so the back of the neck has full contact with the wedge. This maximizes sound conductance between the neck and body.

 

Somewhere during the process on this one, when I removed the tape from the neck heel, (its there to keep the neck from sticking to the epoxy putty) a big chunk of the lacquer came off it. God only knows what they used under the lacquer but it looked like some kind of poly sealant to me. Any jackass knows you cant lacquer over poly sealer and this is one of the results. I wasn't about to refinish the neck and the 5" chip was in a place that wouldn't be seen. I used crazy glue gel to glue it back in place and wanged the neck on with the glue still wet.

 

It glued the neck in place but it is removable if I ever needed to. A flat blade between the body and neck with the bolts removed and the crazy glue would simply snap and the neck would come off with little damage other then that chunk of finish probably sticking to the epoxy wedge.

 

 

Lastly the bridge has a little tilt but not as much as a Gibson does. The original Les Paul's used an ABR1 bridge where the saddles didn't have allot of adjustability. They also tended to use heavier strings so they tilted the bridge much like you would for an acoustic guitar to accommodate the heavier strings to get the kind of compensation.

 

With thin electric strings you don't need nearly that much length and the Gotoh Bridge I used has plenty of adjustability.

 

What I did was make sure the High E was at scale length about 1 saddle width away from the neck side of the bridge.

 

The Low E saddle was at scale length fully extended towards the neck.

 

Since all the strings would be at or longer then scale length when intonated, especially the thicker strings this works find.

 

The tilt on the bridge winds up being about 3~4/16ths longer on the bass side depending on where you measure the edge of the bridge.

[Jazzer2020]

 

Can’t forget the pickup wires. I elected to do this the easy way coming in from the neck pocket.

 

I'm curious to know what would have been the more difficult way?

 

I ask because when I was building a wood piece to plug a hole in the front of my amp, I reached a point where I needed to drill a couple of holes straight down into a piece of wood that had only a few inches access. A drill couldn't fit into that space. So I stopped right there with that part of assembly.

 

BTW, you're getting a great sound with your finished product. Congrats!

[WRGKMC]

 

 

I'm curious to know what would have been the more difficult way?

 

I ask because when I was building a wood piece to plug a hole in the front of my amp, I reached a point where I needed to drill a couple of holes straight down into a piece of wood that had only a few inches access. A drill couldn't fit into that space. So I stopped right there with that part of assembly.

 

BTW, you're getting a great sound with your finished product. Congrats!

 

I used an extended length bit for that. I bought it specifically for that reason.

 

In the past I've used regular shorter bits and come in through both sides of the block of wood between the pickups. You have to be real careful doing this because the drill head can chew the wood up if you get too close to the body drilling on an angle.

Hopefully doing this you would have the two holes being drilled from both sides meet in the center. If not you wind up having to ream the holes larger to get the two to connect.

 

Drilling from the Bridge pickup to the control cavity and drilling a bridge ground wire from bridge post to cavity are the same thing.

 

I've done most builds with standard bits and every time I'd say to myself I need to break down and buy a long bit. In this case I did and had a 6" bit which I only use for builds like this.

 

Its just one of many tools that make life so simple. You collect as your building skills require them. So long as I don't accidentally loose it I wont have to try and angle channels using the wrong tool and wrong method again. I can probably think of a dozen additional tools that could make builds easier. I guess I just built them with simple hand tools so long I just don't think of them before I begin another build and wind up getting replacements when the old tools fail and have no option.

 

I have a half good quality builds now and I only build one every year or two now, and even though I can knock them out quickly once I get going, I do allot of procrastinating before I get motivated.

 

I'm Working on a Firebird shaped Body next made from 200 year old Purple Heart. The wood came from an antique bed rail my buddy scrounged up for me. Its been cut and glued into a wood block. My buddy has an electric planer and I'm having the thickness of the chunk reduced to reduce weight. I have to try and get it under 10 lbs. or I'll never be able to play it strapped on. My Paul is a heavy one weighing in at 11lbs and the my shoulder can hack wearing it for more then one set at a time any more. I may use some creative cutaways on the back to thin it out even more along the edges once I've cut the shape. I should get it back at about 2" which is about as thin as I can go and still sink pickups in it.

[RGfretter]

I always thought a solid maple guitar would be way too heavy.

[Into Nation]

I always thought a solid maple guitar would be way too heavy.

 

Have a look at a Tele next to a solid maple L6-S. Look at the bottom, nearly half as thick and has belly cuts.

 

[WRGKMC]

^^^ My Ric has an all maple body which is similar to the guitar on the right in thickness. Its actually quite comfortable to play. Maple has a wide range of weights too.

[billybilly]

Thanks, I like that it's not complicated, less can be more and often is.