Drilling the cavities in the template

Now it's time to drill the cavities in the template. After that we can tranfere them over the body's surface. Note that the templates seems to be a little bit "used"...

Finishing the body

The body is completely sanded. We finally decided not to drill the bewel until we receive the pickguard in order to check that the shepe fits perfectly. As you can see the neck pocket is not finished because I prefer to have the neck finished to fit it in his hole.

Sanding the body

After hours and hours of sanding with a smooth file we have the body polished. Next week I will round the edges.

The outline (II)

We finally have the body cut. It's been a hard work because of the hardness of the wood. It still misses to sand, sand, sand, sand....

The outline (I)

Once we have the wood block cut in a shape that reminds the final one, we proceed to fix the body template on. We used the router with the drill shown on the picture that helps us to outline the body shape.

As the drill is not too long we will make the process in two parts.

Cutting the body

The body is cut. As you can see all the contours are rough. We used a jigsaw and a router to cut the wood. With professional tools this part would have been much more easy because it's really hard to cut a piece of wood so thick. Now it starts the hardest part: we have to polish the shape and sand it.

Attached below some details of the work

Wood

Wood used in this project is the same as the original guitar.

1. Body: ash (51 x 35 x 4,5 cm)

2. Neck: maple (69 x 100 x 2,5 cm)

3. Fingerboard: rosewood (60 x 70 x 0,6 cm)

We start with the body. First of all we draw the shape of the guitar using the template. 

We have to be carefull about the way marks in the wood are. We prefer to have them in the same direction as the neck, like the original Fender Telecaster.

Cutting the body template

Using a jigsaw with a fine blade we proceed to cut the wood. Then we polish the shape to obtain the wished margins.

Templates

After having glued the drawing over a 3mm thick wood, we proceed to cut the wood. The measures were 51 x 35 x 0,3 cm

Drawings

The first thing we need before starting is to have a good drawings of the guitar with the correct measures. This templates in paper of the guitar body and neck will be glued in a thin wood piece to build a "solid" templates. We use white glue.

Then we cut and polish the margins to obtain a template that allows us to draw the shape and cavities on the wood we will finally use. The kind of wood and measures will be discussed in another post.

The project starts

Here I start my first guitar building project. I'll start with an american vintage'52 Telecaster. I have to say that I have no experience in such kind of projects but I'll try to explain step by step how I manage to build the guitar. Hope to be a useful guide for anyone interested in building his own guitar and with no experience. I'll thank any commnent or advise you want to send.