In my intro to woodworking class at College of the Redwoods a few of my classmates decided to build guitars. After a couple months of being asked questions and watching their progress I decided it was about time for me to build my own. I have seen many bass guitars in the shape of a violin (most famously, Paul McCartney's), but have not seen many guitars in the shape of a violin, so I decided to build one. I had a nice slab of mahogany lying around, so on a long weekend I finally decided to start my "violintar". Because I was at home without access to band saws or anything I went at my slab of mahogany with some hand tools, and here is what I turned out: It is made of three pieces of 3/4" mahogany and a strip of maple that I planed down from 3/4" to 3/8". Even though the face of my guitar will be mahogany, the sides will be made of maple, so I decided to make that reference to the body in the neck with that stripe of maple. All of the violin shaped basses have a traditional guitar headstock, so I decided to go with a slotted headstock more like an actual violin: When I got into the wood shop I took the rest of my piece of mahogany and resawed it in half and bookmatched it to create a thin and almost seamless soundboard. I then had to make a special jig in order to glue the two pieces of 3/8" thin stock edge to edge: Once glued together, I traced out my body shape and laid out some parts on the soundboard to see what my general layout will be and to figure out my scale length. Yes, I know, all of my components are chrome except my gold humbuckers. But I am trying to use all parts that I have already accumulated over the years, so unless I feel like actually buying some new pickups, the final violintar will have these mismatched finishes. For the rest of the guitar I plan on constructing in the fashion of a telecaster thinline, where instead of bending sides and all of that extra effor, the back and sides are all one piece of thick wood that is hollowed out: Thinlines, however, are only semi hollow bodies, as you can see the center is solid. I plan to hollow out more so that it is closer to a full hollow body. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As I was routing out the body cavity, the router bit started to slip out of the collet unfortunately by the time I realized what was happening I had already blown a hole through. Instead of a traditional roudover on the edges of my guitar, I went a little fancy and grabbed a bit for making moldings and ran it around my body: I then moved on to the neck, which I decided to dovetail into the body. After the glue set I decided to get to work on patching the hole. I used a coping saw to cut the hole larger to a size and shape that could be easily filled. after dressing the hole, I then placed a scrap of 3/16" mahogany behind the hole, and traced the inside of the hole. After some cutting and filing and fitting I was able to get a patch that looked a lot better that what I expected to turn out. Here I am gluing the fretboard down to the neck: I then went to work and dressed and fretted the fretboard up. I also did some sanding to take out all of the pen and pencil lines. here is a closeup of my rough carvings for the f-holes: |
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