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Lots of issues to deal with still. LOTS. Not to mention the neck still being hugely thick, there's a gazillion little details to worry about, fret ends etc. and there's a couple of high frets as well still. Can't seem to get them properly seated, I'll have to remove and make sure there's nothing in the groove, probably there is something.

Then it's a lot of sanding and such as well, the saddle and whatnot. Drilling some holes for controls etc. etc... ...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_6...0/IMAG0710.jpg

Ready for fine sanding and such...lots and lots of sanding to do now. The neck has a shape as well but it's too thick as of now.

Curious thing BTW...I have all the parts like pickups in a box, and the box weigh just about the same as the guitar with just the wood parts. This is going to be a rather light one!

Can't tell from the photo but the top is slightly ...

The shape is still rough; there will be a deeper/rounder cut at the back and of course every edge will be trimmed nice, the body is about 1/4 too big almost everywhere right now, quite rough sawn as it is. I wanted to leave plenty of wood for sanding it down nice.

Ditched the tu-tone color scheme; took a while to get the mid section colored the same as the ...

OK, here's the whole thing from another angle.

Clearly shown the body wood and the overlaying veneer...there will be another veneer for the back, but not with maple showing, all intact from the back. I'll contour the edges some and they will be black, thinking of some kind of sunburst. Although white binding would be super cool too..only, that might be a bit much to try to learn how to do.

The body wood also has all cavities done, plus most of the wire routes...now ...

I'm going to leave it 2-tone all the way...so much like it is now.

Here's a guitar-size slab of veneer done with the markers:

Alright; seems I've settled with the star shape. Here's the fretboard glued in place and radiused and the neck part laid over the bottom veneer with the shape marking. Also the headstock shape now visible; the same knife shape repeats in the body.

The body will be built much like an acoustic, but with ~1" thick maple sides and the neck-thru, but anyway ...

While the glue is still drying, I made this radius sanding tool to keep me busy. I screwed a slab of metal onto a chunk of acrylic or similar quite hard/resilient plastic of some sort (used to be a MinuteMaid chopping board) , dipped it in boiling water and used screws and a few washers to force it into a nice curve; it was easy to adjust it by turning the screws in various locations. ...

Alright, now making good progress!




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Here's how I thought I'd shape the 'wings'.



It's shaped so that the neck will sit the same as in strat both sitting and standing, i.e. the strap buttons are in the same positions over the fretboard & as far back.
It looks smaller than it is because at this point the neck is way wider than it'll be when done...same size as a strat, really.