The First Cut

Today I spent a few hours making the first cuts on the guitar body.  It feels good to finally start cutting on the body after all this planning.  I was a little nervous at first, but once I got used to the Dremel and how it cuts, I felt pretty good and it actually went fairly quickly.  My goal for today was to use the Dremel tool to route the deep areas of the carving.  I did a few practice cuts on a piece of scrap wood to make sure I knew what I was doing, and then I started cutting on the guitar.  I used the Dremel multi-purpose 1/8" cutting bit with the depth set attachment.
Dremel 561 Multi-Purpose Bit

Demel 561 bit with depth attachment

I found that I couldn't go as deep as I wanted or it wouldn't cut too well, so this cut is only about 1/4" deep and I'll need to do a second pass to make it deeper.  I'm not quite sure if I want to make the deep areas all the same depth yet or if they will be transitions (sloping) to look a little more organic..I need to think about it a little more.  Starting out, I initially just shaded in the areas I knew were going to be the deepest:

Shaded areas

Next I got to work, carefully routing out the pockets which will be the deepest carved areas.  I'll be making a second pass to make these pockets even deeper but I ran out of daylight.  Once those are the correct depth, I'll go back and finish them off with the hand tools to clean them up, round the edges, add transitions, etc.

Routing the deep pockets

Finished routing 1st depth cut (still needs another pass to make it deeper)

Tomorrow I've got to head out of town for work and I'll be gone until Friday but hopefully next weekend I can make the final cut with the Dremel, and then from there it should be all hand tools (gouges, chisels, etc) to shape the body and hair.  That's going to be the tough part.

Carving Tools

Today I bought a set of carving tools I'll use to shape the guitar.  I bought the set on Amazon.  Based on a lot of the research I did online, the Pfeil Swiss Made gouges are pretty good (and definitely not cheap).  Now I just need to learn how to use them and also how to keep them sharp.  They should arrive on Friday or Tuesday.

The set includes:

• 8mm skew chisel
• 7mm #8 gouge
• 5mm #9 gouge
• 1mm #11 veiner
• 2mm #12 v-parting tool
• 3mm #5 gouge

Some random artwork

This has nothing to do with the guitar, but I'm gonna post some random artwork I did several years ago.  For a while I was on this kick of drawing some of my favorite musicians, so that's what a lot of them are.

Stevie Ray Vaughan - this is the first musician I attempted.

Eric Clapton...face is jacked up

My man Hedrix

Bob Marley

Kurt Cobain - this one's my favorite and surprisingly took the least amount of time to draw (~4 hrs)

I did a lot of other random drawings too.  Here's a few that don't suck completely:

Tiger...not sure what I was thinking

Random chick

Here's a picture I drew of Kelly and me the first year we were dating.  The picture is one we took at the Trail of Lights in 2004.  Not my greatest, but looks a little but recognizable right?  ...right?

Prep

I spent some time today transferring the sketched design on paper onto the actual wood body.  Here are the general steps I followed:

• Scaled the sketch to be 1:1 (i.e. actual size) to match the real guitar body.  I did this in Adobe Illustrator.  I found an old engineering drawing for the original Strat body on the web and it had overall length & height information for the body.  So all I had to do was scale up the sketch until it matched those dimensions.
• Printed out 1:1 paper of the design - the actual body is about 18" x 12.75" so I didn't have access to paper that large.  I could have gone to Kinko's and printed it, but instead I just printed it on two pieces of paper (11" x 17" each) oriented vertically, and then taped them together.  This gave me a 1:1 sized copy of the design.
• Next I bought some 9"x13" sheets of carbon paper ($2.99 @ Hobby Lobby) and taped them to the guitar.  I used 2 sheets.  Once those were taped on, I cut out the 1:1 paper copy and taped it on top of the carbon paper:

Started adding graphite paper

1:1 paper copy taped on top of graphite paper on top of body

• The next step was to simply trace the design and the graphite paper copied it onto the wood body.  This worked great.

Concept transfered to body using graphite paper (and tracing the design)

• Finally, I assembled the input jack plate, pickups & pick-guard, and the bridge.  I was worried that the sketch was overlapping some of these hardware items, so I wanted to check them to make sure they weren't overlapping before I start carving the wood.  Cause that would suck...turns out it did overlap in a few places (whew...good thing I checked) so I just erased the problem areas and re-drew them so they don't interfere.  Here is the result:

Design copied to body with hardware installed

So at this point, I think I'm basically ready to start carving.  However, it probably will be at least a week before I can start that process.  I need to do some YouTube research on how to carve since I've never done this before.  People keep telling me I should practice on some scrap wood first, but I'm just going to jump right in and try to learn on the fly.  Might be a total disaster, but hopefully if I just take my time it'll turn out OK.  Also, I don't actually have any carving tools.  I'm gonna order a set on Amazon tomorrow and hopefully I'll get it by Friday and can do some work this weekend.

Background

Here are some pics of what I'm starting with.  The first is the blank guitar body that I'll be carving.  I didn't shape it, I bought it on ebay like this about 5 or 6 years ago.  It is a Fender Strat replica but I'm not sure what kind of wood it is or how easy it will be to carve up.

The next is a picture of the original design that I was going to try to carve.  This design was much simpler than what I am going to do now.  I wasn't too crazy about it.

And finally, this is the design that I'm actually going to attempt to carve.  As you can see it is much more complex with a lot of depth.  The design was done by my buddy Chris (aka Beef, aka C-Fresh).

In the beginning...

So here's what's up....I'm creating this blog to document the progress on a new project I'm starting this weekend.  I want to take pictures along the way to show the progress and this is the perfect medium for tracking the project.  The goal is to carve up a guitar body with a design that I created with the help of a friend.  I came up with some concepts (which I'll post later) and I'll also post the final design.  My buddy is a better artist than me so I asked him to tweak the design and clean it up a little.  I think the final result is gonna be pretty sweet if I can pull it off.  That is a big "if".  I've never carved anything before...and this project is probably way more ambitious that I should be attempting.  I don't even have any carving tools except for a dremel tool.  I'm going to buy a beginner's carving gouge set by Pfiel (Swiss Made).  So as of today, I have a design (on paper) and a blank replica Fender Strat body that I will be carving.  I don't even know what kind of wood it is...I've had it for years.  I had planned on doing this project about four 5 or 6 years ago and just never got started.  So where did the idea to do this come from?  I came across a website several years ago and I thought the concept was awesome.  Custom carved designs into guitar bodies...I've really never seen anything like this in person.  Anyhow, here are some links:


This is the original carved guitar website that I found: http://www.carverdoug.com/guitars.html

Here is another one I found rececntly.  The Syrena guitar is my favorite:  http://www.divine-jones.com/

So that's the inspiration.  We'll see how it goes.  Oh yeah, and before I forget I just wanted to say that I don't have any grand delusions that my guitar is going to turn out even remotely like any of these.