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.