| Page 45 | Rag 'n' Bone Brown - UK Woodworking and Restoration YouTube projects

Making An Electric Guitar from Oak (part 5 of 9)

In this video I work on the guitar body

Making An Electric Guitar from Oak (part 4 of 9)

In this video, I started by doing some shaping of the end of the frets with an electric file, a hand file, and the orbital sander to round over the sharp edges and make the neck more comfortable to play.

Next I wanted to add some fret dots to the side of the neck. I had an idea to use cocktail sticks or “tooth picks” for this. I first marked up where the holes would need to be drilled with an awl, and then I drilled appropriately sized holes to accommodate the sticks, added wood glue, inserted the cocktail sticks, flush cut them and sanded to finish.

Making An Electric Guitar from Oak (part 3 of 9)

In this video I started by cutting a slot for the nut to slot in to the fretboard. I did this on the cross cut sled on my tablesaw, making a couple of passes to get the slot to the right size. Then I did a bit of shaping to the end of the fretboard using the belt sander.

Next I wanted to add the frets to the neck, and I used a free online tool by StewMac which accurately calculates the correct fret spacing for the scale of any guitar. Then I carefully marked these up measuring the distance from the nut slot using a steel ruler.

Making An Electric Guitar from Oak (part 2 of 9)

In this video I began by drilling the holes for the tuners to fit in to the headstock. I did lots of careful measuring to check that the tuners were eventy spaced out and level with the string slots of the nut. I first drilled some pilot holes with a 2mm drill bit on the drill press, and then I drilled the holes to their final size.

The heatstock wasn’t quite wide enough, so I glued on another strip of oak to it. Once the glue had dried, I could then shape the headstock on the bandsaw and belt sander.

Making An Electric Guitar from Oak (part 1 of 9)

Following my fairly successful ukelele build recently, I decided up the stakes a bit and have a go at building an electric guitar. I’d never built a guitar before.

I would start by making the neck. I used oak which came from some salvaged hat and coat stands – I had to cut them to length, thickness plane them and then laminate two pieces together to give me a workpiece which was the right size. Then I could mark up where the headstock and nut would be, and also where the neck would meet the body.