How to Build Your Own Guitar

How to build your own guitar from scratch.
This instructable will help you learn how to customize your own guitar, starting with a body blank.

Step 1 Shaping the Guitar

Shaping the Guitar is a difficult step. This will take a lot of time and will be challenging. You must obtain a body blank that can be bought at any wood specialty store. For my guitar, I just used a large piece of swamp ash, but you can also get different types of wood such as mohagony, but they will cost you anywhere from $55-$240. The first thing you should do is mark out where you are going to cut out on the body blank. I did this by tracing an old guitar onto the body blank. This may not be the correct size of a body, but you can always customize the pickguard to make it fit. To cut out the guitar body, I used a 1/4" blade on the bandsaw. To start, you should cut off any excess pieces of wood from the body blank that aren't needed. Now you must do a lot of relief cuts in the sharp turning areas of the cut. The best thing you can do is to take it easy and slow and slowly make your cuts.

Comments

[dermord]

Nice...and the Neck?

[lasersage]

totally great that you're bothering to make your own guitar, but they way it reads sounds more like you're putting up with 2 pickups instead of 3, putting up with a tele bridge instead of a strat, and altering other things based on the shape of the scratch plate. Surely if you're going to the trouble of making your own nice solid body then you'd make it the shape and style you want and make a scratch plate to fit. Big sheets of scratch plate material (triple lam) are only like £10.

[connorm]

yeah i was thinking about doing that, but i was doing it for a school project and it had to be done right away, but i might actually go get one of those scratch plates thanks man

[Bongmaster]

hi it looks like u published this before it was complete ;)

[connorm]

haha yeah im still working on it, but im still waiting for parts that are coming pretty soon so it should be done in about a month

[Bongmaster]

should have left the publishing til then XD it stores unpublished u know ;)

[Kiteman]

Agreed.