Sorting the neck and headstock

From the original post about the parts I have for this build, you will recall that on this occasion, I am using an NOS Les Paul neck that I had bought some time ago. I saw it for sale on the web and couldn't miss the opportunity. As this is my first ever attempt at building a guitar, I also think making a neck from scratch may be beyond me. I will however, definitely be making my own for the next build as during the process of researching this one, I can see it is entirely possible and not beyond my limited skills.

Here's how the neck originally looked in the pics of the materials I have bought.



So the first thing to do is remove the unfinished section on top of the peg. To do this, I simply used a wire hand saw and cleaned up the tenon with sandpaper, giving me the resulting finish:



I have also made a few cardboard templates of the neck profile at key points along its length and hand sanded the neck, checking with the templates that the curves are correct as they travel along the length. The heel you see in this photo is correct for the model. Later Les Pauls had a much more rounded heel.



The rear of the headstock was totally unfinished and quite a lot of time is spent removing the excess wood with my hand sander to create the right blend of the neck, running in to the flat surface of the rear of the head.

Next, came the headstock overlay. This again, was an original NOS overlay with the Gibson logo already installed in nice Mother Of Pearl. Using the actual headstock as a template, I drew around the veneer overlay and cut it out roughly to shape, leaving a little excess around the sides and top.






This was then glued to the head using wood glue, sandwiched between the head and the MDF template I used to cut the overlay. Once in place and the glue is dry, the small amount of excess can be hand sanded away until it is flush with the headset wood.

All that remains fro the neck is final sanding and polishing of the headstock veneer, ready for final top coats.

Adding the binding to the body

Next job seems to be quite a simple task but it's one of the most nervy parts of the whole job. Routing the channel around the lip of the top is something that can ruin the whole project if you slip. My advice would be to practice over and over again on spare bits of wood until you are 100% confident you have the technique.

Also, because of the way the grain lays on the top, you should always cut the channel starting from the neck position at the top of the guitar (where the switch goes). Start your cut here and work all the way around until you have finished by going around the inner part of the horn and back up to the neck. If you go in the other direction, you will tear the wood around the horn.

To route the binding slot, i used one of these:



Click HERE for more detail

It's best to take off as little as possible and make a few passes around the job than try to do it all in one go. If you slip, or it tears the wood, your project is ruined.

The channel MUST go down to the point where the top meets the body of the guitar and be 2mm in. The binding I have is cream (again, from Stewart Macdonalds) and it measures 6mm deep by 3mm thick. This means that once glued in place, there is a millimeter of height and thickness to play with. IMPORTANT: Make sure your binding channel is super tidy and free from dust or wood particles that will interfere when laying in the binding. It MUST be a precise right angle and be sharp edged and tidy.



I started adding the binding from the top neck position. Prepare plenty of strips of tape to hold it in position and have them at hand, ready to be picked up quickly. I used SuperGlue in the slot and did around 2 inches at a time. Any excess glue can be cleaned off later in the final sanding but try not to get too much on your wood or it may soak in and effect the finish. You can tape up safe areas with masking tape if you wish to protect the wood a little.

Feed in the binding and press it TIGHT in to the slot you have made and secure it immediately with tape. I used thin(ish) strips of carpet tape which meant I could really pull on it tight without it tearing.

Here's how it looks with all the binding taped and glued in place.



I left my binding like this for one day. When all the tape is removed,the binding can then be trimmed down to something nearer the finished size. For this job, I used a combination of a 6 inch steel rule edge for the bulk of the work and a Stanley Knife blade for the tricky areas. Both work well, but watch your fingers.



Trim off enough to make the binding flush with the outer edge and the upper surface of the guitar body. It can be fully smoothed off later when the guitar is final sanded.

With any luck, your binding will be totally flush in the channel with no visible gaps and be nice and tight again all edges. Like this:





The body can now be set aside, somewhere dry and warm for a little while.

Profiling the Top

Unfortunately, getting carried away with the build, I forgot to take a picture of the jig I created to make the flat surface toward the neck pocket on to which the fretboard sits. To do this, I basically created a box in to which the body of the guitar lays with its top upward. The sides of the box are flat but part way down the sides, I cut away an angle of 4.5 degrees. This basically means that if i set a router to just miss the upper surface of the guitar top, at a set point, running over the body, it will take away wood gradually more and more as it travels toward the neck. This creates a perfectly flat surface on to which the fretboard will sit.

You can see the end result here:



You can see a line around the edge of the guitar which is the depth the top will eventually be profiled down to. It already has a flat slope down to this point at the neck joint. This is the flat surface I cut and described above.

At this point, you can also see that the sides of the guitar have been sanded a little cleaner so that any loose bits of wood do not fall under the body or top when it is clamped for working on. This would lead to small indentations in the surface that may be impossible to sand out without spoiling the shape or profile.



Here you can see that I have started to route a flat surface around the edge of the upper body. This flat are goes almost all the way around the LP shape with the exception of the horn area, which has a more gentle slope. This flat plane goes in to the top by 27mm before starting to curve upward to create the unmistakable Gibson Les Paul violin shape top.

On top of the guitar body, you can see my small hand plane with curved base and blade that i purchased From Stewart Macdonals. I will hand plane the top down to the area routed out around the edge. The edge routing was done using a template Identical to that for cutting the body shape, only smaller.

I am planing as much as possible but leaving a very small lip, which i will remove with a palm sander to finish off the job.





Having taken off as much as is required with the plane, it is quite a time consuming job to finish off shaping with my small, Black and Decker palm sander. Takes ages, but the results are really good if you continue to check progress as you go to avoid over sanding and spoiling the curves.



Here is the top sanded to the correct shape without sanding to a final finish. It is very, very close to the original contour and well worth the effort of doing it by hand.











Notice inside the curve of the horn, the depth of the top is thicker than everywhere else. On modern Gibson Les Pauls, this is covered with the binding, which also gets thicker at this point. On a 1959 Gibson Les Paul, the binding was 2mm thick by 5mm deep and it ran all the way around the top at exactly the same size, so inside the horn area, a small part of the top was revealed underneath. I don't know if that was by design or a fault in the factory, but that's how it was. Gibson merely left it there and lacquered over it. I'm following the same style.

Very final shaping in preparation for the finish is yet to be done.

Body & Top.

I hope somebody finds this amusing.

When it came to putting the top on the body, i realised I didn't have either enough clamps OR the right kind of clamps. So a bit of a compromise was made. I scribed a centre line down the top of the body to indicate where the centre of the bookmatch would fall, then applied white PVA wood glue to the surface using a spreader with teeth for an even covering (a little like ceramic tile spreaders).

I applied the Maple top as two separate pieces ensuring the centre of the bookmatch lined up with the centre line of the body and then using off-cuts, long enough to spread the pressure, used all my clamps around the project to marry the two together.

To add a little more weight, I threw on my toolbox and a hammer. That 1lb or so might make all the difference. LOL



After a day, it was dry enough to remove the clamps and use the body itself as a template to route out the top. The centre line you see here is a pencil mark, as opposed to a gap.



As you can see from the image above, I have also routed out the pockets for the pickups. Once more using paper and MDF templates which can be re-used. Both pockets are identical and are down the correct depth allowing for a small amount to yet be removed from the top plane.

Cutting the body shape

Using my plans, I used tracing paper (because I don't want to cut up my plans) to make a exact copy of the body shape. I used spray mount to stick this copy to a sheet of card, which I cut out with a scalpel on the "outside" of my marked line. This card template was them placed on to a 20mm MDF board and used as a template to draw around, again, on the outside.

The reason for the above is that the end result gives you the shape of the body for your guitar with around 1 or 2mm extra all around. You can take away this extra later when finishing by hand as it is best to have a bit too much than a bit too little wood to play with. Here is the finished MDF template. It takes quite a while to cut these out using a jig saw and sanding to the final shape. But time spent getting your templates right is invaluable as it sets the standard for the end result. You can always re-use them too, so it's worth making the effort to get them perfect.



Because of the type of router I am using, sticking the template to the body wood meant that the first pass to cut out the body shape would mean trying to remove a lot of wood in one go. To overcome this, I raised the template by sandwiching off-cuts under it to "float" the template. I then clamp all this up and make a few passes around the edge of the guitar body, removing about 3 or 4mm each pass.



Once I have done a few passes, I un-clamped the whole thing and removed the template before re-applying it directly to the body. I can now carry on running passes around the body to cut out the rough Les Paul shape.



What I am left with is the roughed out shape of the guitar with a little extra all the way around.







It looks a little rough, but there really is plenty to play with and quite a lot of work still do do to achieve the final shape. But this is an excellent start.

Whilst I was at it, you might notice I also cut the slot for the wiring channel using the template technique described earlier. An original 59 Gibson would have been drilled through from the jack point but I don't have a drill bit anywhere near long enough. So I did it the modern way and routed a channel.

Preparing the top

The top for the project is a superb piece of flame Maple, bookmatched and roughly the right sort of dimensions that I purchased from North Ridge Hardwoods USA. The above image shows how it arrived as a set. The final overall depth of the top is 13mm when finished and this set is only slightly over, so it is close enough to get to the right size sanding by hand. However, it does not fit side by side properly as there are minor gaps, so it will need the edges sanding for a tight fit.

However, the figuring in the grain look terrific.





To get the bookmatch to fit perfectly, I guess I could have taken the set to a professional joinery company and have them run it through a bench cutter to shave a fraction off the insides, but as this set was very close, it was a simple job to sand them by hand to make them match up properly.

To do this, I tipped my workbench to 90 degrees and taped a strip of sand paper along the back edge. Then, holding the sections flat on the bed, sliding them back and forth to take off any high spots.



Below, you can see how the high spot on this piece was toward the centre by the residue on the sandpaper strip.



Keep working at it carefully, checking every few strokes to see how the joint looks. The end result should be a sharp edge that matches perfectly with it's bookmatched twin.

A few more bits have arrived.

Been waiting for these for a while, so it was great to see everything turn up. I have bought a set of Gibson Burstbucker PAF's with nickel finish and a pre-wired kit to be installed later.

Here are a few shots of the harness. All genuine stuff.





Wiring has never been my strong point, but even I can't mess this up can I? I mean, it is almost done for me. All I have to do is connect a few wires following the diagram that came with it.

All of the above items were bought from Ebay following hours of searching and decisions. The kit I have bought will create a sound close enough to what I am trying to achieve and be suitable for the type of guitar I am making. There are lots and lots of other types of kit I could have bought which would have been perfectly fine, but I set myself a challenge to make this as perfect as possible and I'm sticking with it.

The fretboard

Just for a break from the body and to get a rather tedious job out of the way, the fretboard was done next.

For this, I have a nice piece of Rosewood that i bought as a blank. It is wider than required and I had to actually buy a profile planer to put the radius on it. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pics of it but I will on the next one.

I used my small table saw to cut the fret slots first after marking them all from the plan. I made absolutely sure they were 100% accurate as it is obviously important to the notes the guitar will play when finished. It took absolutely forever to cut them all and get them right.



The trapezoid inlays were actually bought as shown, already cut to shape but a little thicker than required. This meant I could use them to mark out the position of the slots accurately and then set about using my Dremel to cut the recesses. Again, it takes absolutely ages and you need a LOT of patience.





I probably went through almost my entire collection of "bits" to get these right and it almost drove me mental. But they all fit nice and tight. And if you have any doubts about the conditions I'm working in...



Next, I have glued in all the fret markers using epoxy glue. The kind where you use two squirts. 1 of glue, the other of hardener. You can buy it anywhere. It looks a bit messy, but final sanding to create the bevel profile is yet to be carried out.



Profiling was done using a special sander I bought from Stewart Macdonald (USA) to create the bevel on the fingerboard and I then sanded the whole surface by hand using VERY fine paper until it was silk smooth. Couldn't resist applying a little linseed oil to see how it is going to look.

Getting started. The body.

The first thing I start is the actual body. I'm using a piece of lovely grained Mahogany sourced over the internet from the USA. It is soundwood and has been kiln dried. Don't bother purchasing any other kind, with all the effort that goes in to making a guitar, it is wasted if it doesn't sound right when it is finished. Soundwood/tonewood is the only kind that will give you the correct end result.

The body blank /I bought is over-sized, so there is plenty of room to cut out the classic Les Paul shape in one go. When finished, the dimensions of the body are precisely 442mm long from neck are to the bottom end pin and 330mm wide. You need to be ordering a piece of wood that will fit this dimension in to it comfortably. My piece is also a little thicker than required, which also allows me to have the piece thickness sanded and leave a bit extra for final hand finishing.

WARNING: Do not buy a piece of wood and have it "planed" to the correct thickness. It MUST be sanded to thickness. I have to take mine to a specialist woodworking company for this job as I simply don't have the equipment. But for a few pounds, it's worth it. Planing a piece to thickness WILL rip the wood and make all kinds of unsightly marks in it. Possibly beyond recovery. Soundwood is way too dry for a planing machine and it rips it to pieces.

The body, before you begin, should be 45mm thick.

Using my plans as a template, I use a piece of tracing paper and carefully outline the back of the guitar shape for the body. I also mark the position of the cutaway for the switch and pot hole covers as well as the outline of the actual cavities. Then I cut these shapes out using a surgical scalpel. You can now tape the body template to the wood and mark the position for the apertures for the routing mentioned above as well as the outline of the body. This gives an accurate positioning for the work about to be carried out. The outline for the body is only for reference and positioning. A more accurate shape will be created to cut it to shape later. Mark all the shapes from your templates on the body in the correct position. Double check everything.

Again, using the same paper templates, you can make cutter guides for your router and be sure to mark them so you cut everything out the right way round.



If you are careful, you can use these templates over and over. I use double sided tape to stick them to the body and clamp them down whilst I am working. Here is the first template being used to cut the tone/volume pot cavity. For all the templates I make, I use MDF 20mm thick.



You should take time to do this and concentrate. With care, you can achieve perfect edges that are all neat and crisp. The pot cavity does NOT go all the way through as I have seen on many luthier sites when Les Pauls are being copied. It should stop 2mm short of reaching the other side. When you tap the front, it should sound like a drum.



Here's the pot cavity almost finished. Just a little skim of the bottom required and a short while tidying up rough edges. It is clear to see where I have lowered the router in steps to make my cuts.

Once finished, you can remove the template and replace it with the one to cut the cover recess. Again, use a paper template to make an MDF template and position it using the marks you made on the body from your plan paper templates.



Here you can see the cover recess finished in it's correct position in relation to the pencil guides on the body wood. And a nice close up to show the neatness using only the router.



And finally for this part of the work, check the cover fits. This is why it is important to mark cuts and then have the cover on hand to make sure the hole you are about to cut isn't too small or too large. It may be better to use the actual cover as a template to draw around than the plans if they differ.



Next job, again on the back of the guitar is to follow the exact same process to make the hole and recess for the switch. Remember, the more accurate you make your MDF templates, the better the actual cut will be. Here is the switch cavity done.