1st Practice Carving

As promised, here are some pics of the practice carving I did.  It turned out OK in my opinion...not great but I think I have enough confidence to fix some of the mistakes on the real thing.  I didn't sand it or anything so it still has some rough edges and splinters.

June 14 Updates

Here are some quick updates.  I haven't posted in a few days because I haven't been carving on the guitar body very much.  I decided to go ahead and do a practice carving of the woman's body on a scrap piece of bass wood.  I shrank the image down and transferred it to the bass wood, and now I'm in the process of carving it 100% by hand using the gouges.  It is almost complete, and it didn't turn out too bad so this gives me some confidence I might have a chance to pull this off.  I'll post pictures of this scrap carving later when it is finished.

Also, I've been busy buying parts on Ebay.  Here are some of the parts I have purchased.  I bought a used Mexican Standard Strat neck with upgraded American Standard machine heads (i.e. the tuners).  It's a maple body with rosewood fret board.  I went with the Mexican Standard neck because after taking some measurements on the body I have, I have found that it was pre-drilled for a Mexican Strat tremolo (more below).

Genuine Fender Mexican Standard Stratocaster Neck

I also bought a Mexican Standard Strat tremolo with upgraded block.  Most of the tremolo blocks are die cast zinc, but the one I bought has a solid steel block which is supposed to hold more sustain.  I will say this...figuring out which tremolo to buy was confusing.  There are so many variations depending on what style/year the body is, that I had to do a lot of research to figure out which was the correct one for my body.  In the end, what really mattered is the mounting hole spacing.  On my body, it is 2 1/16" mounting holes and I also wanted the 2 1/16" saddle spacing.  This is a little narrower than the vintage Strats which have 2 7/32" spacing.  The narrower spacing allows for a little bit easier play and helps prevent the strings from slipping off the fret wires.  I've play both types of strats, and I prefer the 2 1/16" although either would have worked.

Mexican Standard Strat Tremolo

I also bought some hardware such as the jack plate and neck plate.  Jack plate is standard, and the neck plate is engraved.  I may replace this in the future, but for now it'll do.

I'm not sure if I've laid out my long term vision for this guitar yet, so I'll describe what I'd ultimately like to do. My goal is to have all the hardware/trim on this guitar be wooden.  There are a lot of vendors that make custom wooden parts and I might make some myself.  Parts I'll ultimately replace with wooden parts are:

• Tuning pegs
• Pick Guard (probably will do rosewood or some other dark wood)..I may do a mother of pearl inlay on this as well
• Control knobs (probably will make these myself with a light colored wood like Maple)
• Pickup selector knob (also will make myself...light colored wood)
• Tremolo cavity plate (on back of guitar)

A Hairy Situation..

I worked on hand carving the hair a little more today.  It's going pretty well so far.  I did get a little too carried away on one part of the hair and I'm not real excited about how it looks...almost too much going on in that little area.  Oh well...chalk it up to learning.  I'm sure once I start sanding everything down smooth the look will change a lot, so I'm not inclined to try to fix it at the moment.  I'm just going to press on.  Overall I don't think it looks too bad.

I don't like the little area right in the middle of the picture

I do like the way this turned out

June 5-6 weekend update

This weekend I spent about 3-4 hours working on the guitar.  First, I went ahead and did a second cut with the Dremel router to make the pockets deeper.  Here is the result:

Pockets routed to final depth

Finally, after making this final Dremel cut I'm ready to start hand carving.  Before I began, I took a piece of scrap bass wood and drew a small section on it to mimic the hair from the guitar.  My goal here was to make sure I could actually carve using the hand gouges.  The result was not too bad, so I started on the guitar.  I think the body is going to be the hardest part to shape, so I started with a piece of the hair on the right side.  My thought is that I can "learn" how to use the gouges on the hair since the hair should be fixable, but the body not so much.  If I jack that up, it's game over.  One unfortunate thing I found when I started carving, is that the entire guitar body is coated in some kind of protecting layer that looks like hardened glue.  It's actually pretty thick (~1mm or so).  This means I have to carve through this layer first, just to get to the wood.  It's a pain, but I'm going to have to do this.  Anyhow, here is the result of the first part of the hair I did with the hand tools (i.e. no Dremel action).  It actually went faster than I though (~1 hour)

Laminate removed (from just the hair portion)

This is what the hair is starting to look like using the hand tools (not complete yet)