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.

Part 1: Mmmmmm... nutty.

(click on images to enlarge)

So, here I am - back at it again. After having built a six string electric and a lapsteel electric I figured my next challenge should be a 12 string electric. I'll be honest - I'm not a huge fan of the Byrds (the band with the most famous electric 12 string sound) but I am into Tom Petty and early R.E.M. (two bands with enough Rickenbacker 12 string to choke a horse).
I also saw a local band recently that had a 12 String lead player and it definitely is a cool sound when done right.
Plus - who wants to pay $1000 (more like 2K to 3K) for a 'Ric' when you can build one for $600 and 60 hours of labor?

Who am I kidding?
This will probably cost me $1000 and be 100 man-hours by the time I'm done. But - you gotta have hobbies.

First off. I'm not building a Ric. I'm building a 12 string, semi-hollow body, PRS-style electric. I'm a big fan of the PRS body shape and I wanted to try a carved (or shaped) top once before I attempt to build a Les Paul (probably my next project - sometime in 2012). In addition - I have a PRS - so making templates and measurements will be a little easier.

So here's what I did:

Last year I bought a chunk of Butternut wood. I bought it because it was 20 x 14 x 1 3/4 in size - which meant I didn't have to do any gluing/joining to get to the size I need to build a guitar - which makes me happy. And heck - who says you can't build with butternut? There's some dude in New York building Tele's out of Pine.
Vivre la différence!

What is butternut you ask? Check it out. It is sometimes called 'white walnut' but I'm not sure how closely they are related. Butternut has some of the same characteristics as walnut and mahogany (huge pores that will need to be filled later) but it is the lightest wood I've ever worked with. A similar sized chunk of mahogany or walnut would take two hands to hold. This takes one hand.
...could be something good.
...could be something bad.

I then traced the outline of my PRS (a 1989 CE - aka bolt-on) onto a sheet of 3/4 inch MDF and made a template. Trace it, cut out the rough shape with a jig saw, and sand it smooth. Et voila! You have a template of the PRS body.

I then made a second template of the PRS out of MDF that I will use to route out the body cavity. I would like to tell you that I measured meticulously and took into account what frequencies will feedback in a chamber this size - but I didn't. I took some measurements (how much wood I'll need to mount the bridge, pickups, neck, etc) but otherwise I just made sure that the outer wall of the chamber was 1/2 inch thick so that the body has enough strength to stand up to 100 plus pounds of string tension.

After creating both templates I traced the outline on the wood and marked off what areas will be removed. By the way - sanding these MDF templates using a drill press and a 'drum' bit made life much nicer - especially for the template that I'm using for the chamber.