Dee's guitar-making/modding projects blog

I've now raw-cut the maple, and I'm going to make the neck with two pieces, the main part will be a neck-thru single maple slab, quartersawn, near the very center of the tree, so the growth circles will nearly match the shape of the neck. I will make the headstock from the same wood but I've cut a slab that I'll set to the neck at roughly 10-15% angle so that the join will take place under the 2nd fret approximately - from there on the grain of wood will then be lateral to the headstock.

Maybe I should start a photo blog of it...it would be slow progress but anyhow.

The way I'm approaching this thing is I don't want to read any info on making guitars, I want to solve all issues and plan all the joins and stuff all by myself without instructions, so it'll be interesting and so on. I spent an hour last night simply eyeballing how do I make the join for the headstock and where to cut the wood and whatnot.

I will also make it a neck-thru so that the body portion will be much wider than the neck, so as to house the pickups completely, and instead of routing from the top, I'm thinking I'd screw the pickups straight to the wood from below - never seen that done but seems like a good idea to me.

I'll most likely add some body 'flanges' too once I get the main instrument done...use some real light wood there to keep the weight down, or maybe even not wood but something different.

But, right now it seems to me I might easily still screw things up real bad as I have no clue for instance how to route a channel for the rod, or simply how do I saw and plane the headstock joint so it'll be straight and not jutting at some direction...maybe I have to make a jig of some kind...but I wanna come up with solutions myself, not check out how it's done usually.