Part 2: Hog'n it

(click on the images to enlarge)

Who ever came up with the term 'to hog' captured so much with so little. I hogged out all of the wood from the chamber using a 1 1/4 inch forsner bit on the drill press. It made short work of that stuff and it means that I don't have to spend the next few weeks with my router. I didn't take a lot of pictures of this but you get the idea. You use the drill press to remove the majority of the chamber and then clean everything up with the router.

One note: be prepared for shavings. I filled my shop-vac with the piles of curly wood shavings from this process. I also found it helpful to vacuum every 5 or 6 holes as it became difficult to see what I was doing (where I was drilling) with all those shavings. I like this drill press (a lot). It makes so many things easier and more precise.



So, once I finished with the hogging I switched over to the router. Sadly, I took no pictures of this process but here's how it went:
I clamped the second MDF template to the wood and used a router bit with a template guide to smooth out the chamber walls. The template guide has a bearing on it that follows the shape of my template (warts and all). I made three passes with the template clamped to the body as the router guide and one pass using the wall of the chamber (once it got too deep to use the template). As you can see from the images I'm going to need to do a fifth pass to remove the pilot holes the forsner bit left behind. Which is fine as the wood has about 1/2 of an inch left to give. I'm thinking I'm going to go down another 8th of an inch. This should get rid of the pilot holes and still leave me with about 3/8 of an inch thickness to the back.



The center block is three and three quarter inches by 10 inches. This should be long enough (and wide enough) to mount the neck, two pickups and the bridge.
You can also see that I made the butt end of the body slightly thicker than the rest of the body. This is for the end-pin (aka strap pin) to have a little girth to sit in and also allow the top to have something substantial to sit on. I think I'm going to use curly maple for the top (aka 'cap'). I have some nicely flamed maple but it's not quite the right size - so we'll see what happens.

Some of you might be asking - 'hey - how come you haven't cut the body out of that block of wood yet?' I figured that since I had so much routing to do - it made sense to keep as much surface as possible (for as long as possible) for the router to sit on. Once I do the last pass with the router I won't need the extra wood any more and I'll cut out the shape.

Next up: 5th pass with the router and freeing the body from that block of wood.