guitar builds 10 - 13

Apologies for leaving you hanging for a while. We had a death in the family and that has taken over my life for the last 6 weeks. So here's a mini report of the last 4 sessions.

Session 10 - routed the cavities for the pots to go in the upper and lower bouts of the body.
Session 11 - routed channels from pot cavities to cone chamber for wiring, drilled hole for jack socket and drilled soundholes in back of body. made small blocks and glued them in the cone recess to support it at the correct height.
Session 12 - Fine sanded neck and body then rubbed thinned down nitro-cellulose lacquer into body (two coats to seal it) and about 6 coats on the bak of neck and headstock. Fine wire wool brought the neck up as smooth as a baby's bum - nah smoother.

Session 13 - one of the scariest - spray painting the body and headstock front. About 10 coast at 15 minutes intervals to build up a decent thickness. I was worried about my crappy spraying techinique causing nasty runs on the guitar and sure enough I managed it. Martin assured me it wasn't a problem as we'll rub it down flat before finally polishing it to a high gloss. seems hard to believe it possible but I've seen his finished results and have confidence it will all be fine.

guitar build session 8

Missed a week of building last week. This week it was all on the neck again. Final filing of neck back profile and sanding to a nice finish. Drilled out holes and installed the mother of pearl fret marker dots and edge dots. Drilled out holes for machine heads. Still a fair bit to do but I put the body and neck lossley together so I could see what it's looking like. Starting to get exciting now.

guitar building course day one

I mentioned in my last post that I was going start on a guitar building course to build a 6 string reso cone, solid electric guitar. OK I know this blog is supposed to be about CBGs but there are many of you who are also interested in more conventional guitars too and learning some general building tips. The idea is that I learn some new skills and build myself something really special. It's loosely based on a National resolectric but with some of my own tweaks to it. I've done a rough photoshop job to show you what it might look like.


I will be building it in half day sessions, roughly once a week. So the first day we headed off to John Boddy's timber yard near Boroughbridge. There's a big warehouse with lots of planks of interesting timber. Martin, my tutor helped me select a piece of maple for the neck/headstock and mahogany for the body. Mahogany was chosen because it is a fairly light hardwood which should emphasise the bass end of the tonal range to balance the rather toppy reso cone. I also bought myself another maple plank that will cut down into 4 nice CBG necks for future builds. Was surprised how relatively cheap maple is. The neck plank cost about £8 and the CBG plank about a fiver. Back at Martin's we started to draw up a full size plan of the guitar. Didn't quite finish it this week. We ordered some hardware too - truss rod, reso cone and plate and a pre-cut rosewood fretboard. Next session we finish the drawing, cut the mahogany in two and glue both halves together to make a wide plank for the body. Probably start cutting out the neck too.