It's my cake day. Enjoy this guitar that I built!

This is "3:43"

I've spent my free time over the last 10 months building this guitar. It's special to me because it's the first guitar that I've built and designed completely from scratch [though the design takes clear inspiration from the Strandberg Boden--see the album description below for more on that as well as specs (for the guitar nerds out there!)]

Here's a quick tone test if you want to hear it in action: https://youtu.be/nDQ6s8_DTeI

The backside

The build process [warning: lots of images, lots of text!]

Before starting on the real thing, I first built a prototype from leftover Home Depot scrap wood. The last thing I wanted was an unpleasant surprise while building the real thing!

[Note: I got a new phone while building this, so I apologize that the early-on photos are straight-up potato-quality.]

...It ended up looking something like this.

Koa!

I did this entirely out of the second bedroom in my apartment. I'd love a basement or garage...but I'm not so lucky. So, the tools that I have available are sometimes less-than-ideal.

For example, here's my handsaw for making big cuts. It took about 55 minutes of sawing to finish this one cut. (I had to do three of these in order to make the multi-laminate neck.)

Having a stable neck is absolutely critical. After sawing the laminates, I then chiseled and planed them to get the grain to run in ideal orientations.

It also makes gorgeous little curly shavings. That was cool to discover since I'd never used chisels or a hand plane before starting this.

The center koa stripe and black limba stringers, taking shape

gluing the neck laminates together

There are two carbon fiber rods and a truss rod embedded into the neck to make sure that it stays straight.

As part of the design, I used fanned frets: they don't run perpendicular to the strings, but go at varying angles so that the low strings are longer (sort of like a grand piano). This has a number of benefits that I won't get into here, but it's much more complicated to execute than normal straight frets, so I wrote a little program using MATLAB to tell me where to cut and verify that everything would work out before I started cutting.

Marking out the frets

Cutting the fret slots with a humble homemade jig.

It turns out that working with ebony stains your hands black, and it's kind of hard to wash out...I started using disposable gloves after that.

Clamping the maple binding to the fretboard while the glue dries

A little more "inventive" solution for the binding at the end of the fretboard.

Bound fretboard

Gluing the fretboard to the neck

The fretboard serves as a template for the router to follow

rough-shaping the neck profile. I used both a spokeshave and chisels.

The neck has a trapezoidal profile [similar to the "Endurneck" that can be found on some .strandberg*s, for the guitar nerds out there.]

Radiusing the fretboard. Lots of ebony sawdust!

Here's a little contraption that I devised to hold the nut blank while I shaped it.

Shaping the nut

Essentially done.

Putting side dots in the neck.

Sanded the side dots down

The body sketch and the koa body

Gluing the body blank together

Routing the neck pocket in the body blank before I rout the body's silhouette around it

Testing the fit. It's snug enough that the neck holds it up without being bolted together.

routing the body shape

...and done!

Now I've got two!

My wife thought it should have stayed looking like this, but the koa wasn't thick enough for that to be an option.

chambering the body; more koa shavings!

chambered body

This guitar has a one-piece top; usually, guitars have "bookmatched" tops that are made of two pieces of wood. I bought a large piece of maple that could give me several tops, but this means that I neede a large bandsaw to cut it...and there's no way that's going to happen in an apartment.

So, I visited the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop to get the top resawn. Alan, who helped me out there, is an incredibly knowledgeable and capable woodworker, and he taught me some very cool stuff in the small amount of time we spent there.

The board behaved splendidly and had absolutely minimal cupping & bowing after going through the bandsaw--very good news!

The top

The body and the top

Gluing them together

After gluing; the body serves as a router template to bring in the top.

After routing

The hardest part was getting the hardware straight. Each string is held by a separate piece of hardware, each individually mounted to the body. It was very difficult and took quite a few practice runs before I figured out a method to get them to go in perfectly straight in a reliable manner.

carving a bevel.

Staining the top. The idea was to take advantage of the two-tone nature of the top wood and have it look like a receding wave on a beach as viewed from above.

Clear coats are fun because everything starts to look awesome.

After polishing the clearcoats

Carving the neck to meet up with the neck pocket

Tung oiled neck

frets installed and tung oiled binding

Test-fitting the electronics

Copper shielding in the control cavity

Control cavity cover made of maple from the top and a "sliver" of ebony

Installed

Hardware and electronics all installed and wired up...and that's pretty much it!

One other special thing that I had done was that I had a silk bag made for storing the guitar--something that I picked up from violinists. Doing so provides an extra layer of isolation from the ambient environment, and further protects the nitrocellulose finish.

The bag was made by Sarah Cranor of Sarah's Violin Bags. When I initially contacted her, she seemed a little surprised by the odd request, but was gracious enough to work with me to design something that accommodated the unique challenges with working with guitars.

More photos of the completed guitar.

Thanks for looking--especially if you made it this far.

Cat tax: this is Depopolo!