ELECTRIC GUITAR

THE PLAN

During lockdown 2020 I decided to start creating my own electric guitar from scratch. I planned to use a stock neck and carve the body and headstock with hand tools in my garage.

I went for a les paul style body with a custom designed headstock. Inspired by a post I found online, I decided to carve with chisels a flame pattern into the front of the body and fill it with epoxy resin.

THE PROCESS

I started by buying two large peices of scottish sycamore and cut a rough body shape out of each, gluing them together to make the required thickness.

After this I made some finer cuts and filing on the edges of the body to refine the shape and add some dimension/radius to the sides.

By this point the main shape of the body had been completed. Still using just hand tools (files, chisels and sandpaper), I cut of the insert for the neck and electronics pocket.

Using a curved chisel, I carved out the flames before mixing the resin. For this, I used some strontium aluminiate (glow in the dark powder) and blue dye.

Finally, after filling it all in, I sanded everything, glued on the neck, soldered the electronics and gave it a coat of laquer before a quick polish to complete the guitar.

THE FINISHED PRODUCT

Overall the guitar plays pretty well, it has a very dense (almost too heavy) body so there is a lot of reverb and a nice tone. The glow powder in the resin worked surprisingly well, ligthing up a room fully for hours having been charged up in the sun during the day.

Should I make another guitar, I would like to experiment with 3D printing parts of it. I printed the electronics cover of this one and engraved EB into the back of it which was an interesting process. I would also like to invesigate EM sheilding for the electronics cavity to reduce interference noise.