It has been a while since I’ve finished a guitar, but I want to keep track of them as they are completed and shared with the world. While I have been working on 3 or so different guitars in the past year, this is the second one I’ve finished.

This build started late last year, and has been a slow process of experimentation, mistakes, learning, and building greater technical skill and knowledge. Once finished, I gave this guitar to my dad as a birthday gift, and so far the feedback is strongly positive.

(Finished pictures show the guitar without a few screws in the pickguard but these have since been added).

The timber

This guitar uses several species.

• The bulk of the body is radiata pine body, two pieces glued down the center line
• The body cap from Australian red cedar (Toona ciliata), glued down the center line
  • This was sourced from antique church pews, dated to the mid 19th century
• Binding from Kauri pine (unsure if NZ or AUS species)
  • This was also sourced from antique church pews from a different site
• Scratchplate from Huon pine and mountain ash veneer
  • The top layer is huon pine veneer, the bottom two layers are differing shades of mountain ash as they were less visible except for the edges
• The neck for this build is a second hand Squier telecaster neck from what looks like maple.

The process

I first assembled the timber for this design over a year ago, but it’s taken a long time to get this guitar into the shape it is today. After my first build, the painted pink strat, I wanted to experiment with a guitar that showcased more of the timber it was made from. My immediate choice was red cedar as the showcase timber, and ideally with an oil and shellac finish which is one of my favourite ways to showcase that species. I was also interested in the body being very dark behind the face to accent the red, and with a high contrast binding and scratchplate to complement. This generated several experiments to put into play on this build:

• Binding the edge of a guitar, specifically using timber or reclaimed plastic
• Painting the back and sides of the guitar without the use of spraying and getting a high quality finish
• If making a timber scratchplate would be possible, and what the process for detailing and finishing would look like
• I was also working on making a neck to match the body (black back, kauri fretboard, and cedar face on the headstock), but this ran into more issues and ended up not looking as nice as I’d hoped.

The body itself was simple. After machining and laminating the radiata and cedar blanks, these were glued together with their centerlines matching. I then used my homemade tele template to mark the shape, and this was then bandsawn and pattern routed to its final outline. The face routing was done with the template, and the neck pocket was routed to a couple of mm above depth for final adjustment once I’d finished working on the neck. In hindsight, I’d have the neck I was going to use at least made if not finished at this point so this could be done at this stage, but that’s a note for future me. I also did two relief carves on the rear, both just carving entirely based on what felt nice as I worked. With this build, I knew I wasn’t going to round the edges on the back or front (just take the slightest edge off the corner with some sandpaper) so having a comfortable place for it to sit against the body felt right.

The other aspect of this guitar was trying a cheap, readily available, and light timber for the bulk of the body. Radiata is the most common construction pine in Australia today and is readily available in reasonable sizes. As the look of the timber was not important, I wanted to experiment with using something easy to access and work with, and it proved to be a great success. The back and sides were also filled with water-based wood filler using a plastic scraper and then sanded back to 280 grit which proved excellent for a finish for paint to stick to.

The body blank cut to size and with relief carving on the rear.

One lengthy process for this guitar was experimenting with different paints for the rear of the guitar. I had spent some time putting together sample boards with different paint finishes, and the one that had the nicest final look was surprisingly black milk paint. After waiting a month after painting, coating with shellac and letting sit for a few weeks, it looked like it could work as a finish, but it was not to be. After painting the rear of the guitar in this paint and polishing up a shellac finish, the guitar looked beautiful, but after sitting for 2 months while I was out of the country and working on other projects it developed a very strong haze beneath the polish – I assume resulting from continuing offgassing of the milk paint as it cured – which sadly had not appeared in the sample boards.

A very sad sanding session, and some further and longer-term testing later, I went with a standard enamel paint finish, opting for 2 coats and a light sand before french polishing, and this ended up working beautifully.

In the end, I’m glad I opted to do the binding after painting because of this process and how much it ended up needing to be sanded, but in future I’d like to try and streamline that whole process more.

The milk paint once dried, prior to buffing. The surface texture was lovely, but in the end the material did not work.

Halfway through sanding back the milk paint and the filler.

2 coats of enamel paint and starting to sand flat - you can see the high points dulling as they’re sanded.

After the paint situation seemed more resolved, I started figuring out the binding. This was my first attempt at steam bending timber, so I spent some time researching online and through my old carpentry texts, and settled on a hot pipe rather than a whole steam box situation – that’s something to try another day.

For the hot pipe I just used a small cut off segment of 1” steel pipe with a hot air gun pointed at it. Not very high tech, but it worked better than I had expected and was far more controllable than I anticipated.

The process was both fascinating and frustrating to start, but the feeling of brittle, breakable timber suddenly hitting a heat level around the pipe where it just gives flexibly was so much fun, and I quickly learned how the timber wanted to move. If you haven’t tried heat bending before, I cannot recommend it any more, even if you just end up with a lot of bendy kindling. The most useful thing I found was to watch a couple of videos of people using other bending irons to get a hang of the temperature you want them to be - that point where a spritz of water dances across the surface with a sizzle, rather than just flashes clean off into steam.

Most of the curves around the guitar bent happily with no backing material, but the tight radiuses around the lower front bout proved trickier. For these, I cut a few small segments of flat sprung steel flat bar around 0.5mm thick and braced the back of the work piece with these to avoid blow out.

In the end, the lower bout is done in two pieces as the double tight curves below the neck pocket proved too tricky for my current skill level, but I’m proud that the top binding piece is all one long strip.

The bending set up - low budget but effective.

On the left, the guitar with binding channel routed, and the strips of kauri pine machined on the right.

A jig I made for the binding strips - matching the channel profile on the body, and with holes cut out to apply clamping pressure (with respective inverse shaped blocks for the clamps), this allowed me to bend all the pieces and then let them rest and dry to the shape without affecting the finish of the body. In future I want to explore using a jig like this but hide-gluing the binding in place for a final rout and/or sand, before loosening and then attaching to the guitar, but more experimentation will be required.

The most difficult set of curves to bend. More experimentation required to see if I can get that tight double curve out of the one strip of timber, or if I need to do it in two or more pieces.

The pickguard was far simpler than I was expecting, with 3 layers of laminated veneer with the grain at cross angles provided a lot of rigidity. Three layers of veneer – Huon pine on top, oriented to look the nicest, with two layers of Mountain ash underneath from the excess veneer stock we have in the shop. This was then attached to a template I’d made and this was used to route the shape, and then a pattern V bit was used to cut the champfer around the edge.

In future, I would add a second template piece, slightly shy of the full dimension, to the top and bolt them together for the initial shape to help keep everything as flat and flush as possible, or even just a sacrificial piece to route with the pickguard, but this turned out okay. The champfer rout worked neatly, but there were still a few corners that weren’t perfect, so I will continue to think about what I do with a router and what I finish by hand.

The other aspect of routing this is that the lines between the 3 layers of veneer blended a little, and I’d be interested to try shaving or scraping in the future to keep those lines distinct.

The pickguard double-sided taped to the template. The edges were still lifting so I used some screws, but in future I would consider hide gluing this in place. In the bottom of the picture you can see the part of the template that broke off of the pickguard itself and so I made it a design feature rather than a bug!

All this time I had been working on a neck, visible in the image below, and the shape was working but the finishing of it really did not, so I was planning on making another one when dear friend Scott Davey gave me a used one he had no use for anymore, and so that became the neck.

Finally it was on to finishing. I’ve played around with shellac and french polishing a lot since I first learned the basis of the technique from friend Shane Wiechnik in the first run of the finishing course we run at the shop, and have pestered him with innumberable questions since, but it’s hard to deny that it’s really just a feel thing, so I did a lot of feeling it out.

I adore it, it’s such a beautiful process and the results are exceptional, but it is also time consuming and unforgiving. I did not make life easy for myself by deciding my first larger french polished finish would be a flat, black surface – there’s nowhere there to hide your mistakes!

The polishing itself was enjoyable, if not time consuming (no one could have warned me about this), and I did a lot of experimentation of different techniques and mixes, including many layers brushed on then polished back, repeating this process. Sometimes I sanded or polished back some layers when I noticed there was some dust present, especially in the black back surface, but this became less of an issue once I got an air purifier in my place and did my polishing at least a few hours after any house cleaning.

For the most part I brushed a 2lb cut and polished with a weakened 1.5lb cut, and this seemed to work, but I was also not super precise, having a jar of 2lb cut that I weakend as necessary for different purposes. This is also where Shane’s wisdom came into play yet again, and I bought a high quality brush for this purpose which made a world of difference – my attempts with cheaper brushes just left lines and even bristles throughout. You don’t need the fancy squirrel hair one, I went with a synthetic bristle, but one that will leave no lines is ideal, and I spent about $25 on it.

One thing I did find in my shellac research was this article from Wood News Online about metric equivalent measurements for shellac “cuts”, which was a fantastic thing. In future, I’ll probably refer to this rather than the pound cuts, referencing “gram cuts” instead. Highly recommend.

Despite all the hassle and frustration, polishing was a deeply satisfying experience and I can’t wait to do more of it.

The face of the body in the process of finishing – notice the grain lines of the cedar still highly visible. I was initially going to try and fill these entirely while polishing, but liked the look of them being partially filled and split the difference from this point.

The back partway through a polishing session. I can recommend trying to polish a large black surface if you want to see where you’re making all your mistakes!

The pickguard after building up layers of shellac, and after only starting the polishing stages.

Finally I purchased a few final new parts, and pulled together all the second hand gear I could manage, including the pickups, bridge, switch and pots. An evening session upstairs with the maestro Scott Davey of Davey Guitar Works got the whole thing wired, strung and set up, and that feeling again – plugging in a guitar you’ve made by hand and it making music for you. There’s nothing quite like it.

Wiring it all up and setting up with Scott Davey.

All up there was a lot of learning from this instrument, and I can’t wait to put some of these new lessons and skills into practice. I really like this colour combination, so there’s definite ideas to explore more of the tele style shape with a cedar top. Watch this space I guess.

Additional pictures

The red cedar cap lamination after gluing but before sanding.

My dinky little hand-made templates. These have worked far better than I could have hoped for and cost me cents on the dollar – would highly recommend making yourself a set if you’re trying to make an instrument but don’t have the cash for a high end template set. The best part is that you can use them to make more, so you’ll never run out of templates! These are made based on plans printed at A4 with registration marks and then PVA glued overlapping into position onto MDF.

Specifications

• Body: Radiata pine back (P. radiata), Australian red cedar cap (Toona ciliata), Kauri pine binding (Species unsure), all reclaimed; Finished with black enamel paint (back of body only) and shellac (whole body)
• Neck: Second hand telecaster-style neck manufactured by Squier, likely maple
• Fretboard: “
• Pickups:
  • Neck: 6.75 KΩ, bought second hand online.
  • Bridge: Specs unsure, second hand from a mate.
• Bridge: Wilkinson WVC-SB in chrome, bought new
• Tuners: Second hand, came with neck
• Nut: Second hand, came with neck
• Hardware: Chrome, bought new
• Truss rod: Double action, bought new
• Pickguard: Layered veneer, Huon pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii) and mountain ash (Species unsure); Finished with Livos’ Universal Wood Oil and shellac
• Fretboard radius: 254mm (10”)
• Bridge spacing: 54mm
• Nut spacing: 34.5mm
• Neck angle: 0º