deadicated's 2012 Challenge Build Thread -- COMPLETED

[deadicated]

I'm gonna throw my hat in the ring for the first time this year. I don't expect to be able to compete with all the talent around here but it should be fun to try. I'm sure it'll be ongoing disaster to watch. It's gonna be a one piece alder body with a bubinga neck, rosewood fretboard and some SD pups. It'll be my first shot at a neck and second body. Good luck to all the rest of you folks willing to put yourselves through the ringer to.

[crazydave911]

Welcome! And good luck!

Dave

[RogerC]

Good luck to you, too! Just enjoy the ride and everything else will take care of itself... well, except the guitar making. You'll have to do that

[deadicated]

Here it is to make it official. Neck and body wood. Those templates should be finished in a day or two then away we go..

[Ryden]

Good luck! and I hope your sig is not a reference to the book of Genesis

[Midnighttoil]

Ryden: the really creepy stuff (his sig) is described in Leviticus!

[Ryden]

Missed that reference, Doc
Chapter, verse?

[deadicated]

O.K. so here we go. Is it only me or does it seem like making a proper set of templates is perhaps the hardest part of the build? At least I finally got them finished yesterday so here's the hole stack.. Then it was time to move on to actually getting some real work done around here. First item up was to thin out that chunk of alder without an easy way to do it. So I used this and it left my nice piece of wood looking like this . After a little sanding I was left with it just a few hundreds over sized and ready to hit the bandsaw later today. Well that's it for now I must be off to work and not the fun sort like I'm having here.

[RogerC]

I really like alder. I'm working on a chambered alder tele with a walnut cap, and right now the body weighs in at about 1 pound. I'm going to have to put an air guitar neck on it just to keep it from neck diving

[emoney]

I've got that same electric planer but dang if I can get it to do anything but tear up wood.
Good on you for a clean "cut down". Looking forward to watching this one develop.

[Teleholder]

That's a really cool looking piece of alder. Are you going to keep some of the little knots showing?

[jkingma]

Originally Posted by Teleholder

That's a really cool looking piece of alder.

+1

[deadicated]

Thanks everyone for the encouragement and kind words, this can be a humbling hobby. I was really undecided on how I was going to finish this guitar but as you will see I've had some help making that decision. The next thing I did was cut out the shape of the body on the band saw. That went rather well and I was feeling like I was getting somewhere. Next in line was to attach the template and break out the router. You can see my wife in the back giving me her approval. Little did she know my lack of prowess and experience with the tool had reared it's ugly head. Fortunately it wasn't all that bad. But it meant this one will get some sort of paint. Forgot to take a pic when it first happened but here's a beauty of it all spackled up. And after a little sanding. This is a little of the current theme here but while all of that was going on I fine tuned the other templates to get everything lining up just so. So far nothing to tragic but there's still a long way to go on this one. There are so many people around here doing crazy amazing things with this, I just hope I can get it finished in time, but there's not to many ways to have a better time.

[mkhhunt]

Nice work so far, and welcome to the hobby! That alder will be really nice, and nice repair on the template oops.

Cheers!

[deadicated]

I've been slacking a bit. I got the control cavities routed and built a jig for the truss rod. I'll upload the pics when I get a few more to do at once. Can't help but to feel like I'm falling behind. I'm starting to see some sleepless nights in my future. But when you have a 3 yr. old and a wife that goes to work when you get home then add to that only being able to work in the back yard it makes it kinda difficult to get things accomplished at times.

[emoney]

You have very good reasons to be where you are. Those little ones don't stay 3 for
very long, so if anything, try to slow that process down and if you find a way, we'll market
it.

Don't stress as you've got plenty of time, and we're all behind you. Some of us are just
now getting to a point where everything slows way down so you'll be caught up before
you know it.

[LightninMike]

Originally Posted by Ryden

Good luck! and I hope your sig is not a reference to the book of Genesis

It's a quote from a Grateful Dead tune.... St. Stephen to be exact...

as far as the build, you can avoid tearout by cutting and sanding closer to the line of the edge of the template before you route it

Keep on Keepin ON!

[deadicated]

A quick update. Some pics will be up tonight but my wife misplaced our memory card while we were on vacation and I'm missing alot of the pics of the neck getting made. I've still got a few and hope to find the rest. Progress has been pretty good as I'll post later.

[deadicated]

O.K. so here we go. I decided to stop on the body until I got the neck done to insure a good fit by the neck in the pocket before I routed it into the body. This being my first neck it's been a little intimidating but it seems to be coming out pretty good. Unfortunately like I said my wife has misplaced a memory card with the early stages of the neck on it but it's still pretty clear I'm doing it. Now for the picks. The first is a couple of the truss rod, it seemed to me to be a kind of odd design. Then again I haven't seen many so I could be wrong. I thought i would be able to rout the channel drill the corresponding hole through the end of the neck and screw the 2 parts of the rod together after putting the nut side through the hole in the neck. Problem was after I routed and drilled I realized the rod was all one part that didn't come apart. To solve this problem I made the channel a little longer on the headstock side and had to make a rout the width and length of the nut just prior to the hole I drilled through the end of the neck. Here you can see the elongated channel behind the clamp on the headstock side. In this one you can see the widened channel on the other end. It worked pretty good, it slid in with a little persuading then I cut a piece to fill the void on the back side so it couldn't move. From there it was just a matter of gluing the fret board and shaping it to the neck. It all worked out pretty good. From there I added the dot markers. It was a big relief when they came out straight. Earlier today I used the drill press with a sander to shape the curve where neck and headstock meet and drill the tuner holes. Starting to look like a neck. That's pretty much where i'm at for now. Tomorrow I'll thin out the headstock and radius the fret board. Well at least try to.

[Amadhunter]

Nice looking build. One piece of advice, be sure and cut off the part of the fb above the nut slot before radius sanding. If you don't, it'll make it real hard to sand level. The sanding block will "ride" up those wider ends of the fb.