Needed a new hobby this summer, so I built an electric guitar in my garage

From raw lumber to playable instrument in two months. The photos don't do it justice; it's much uglier in person. But I love it, and I'm proud of how it turned out.

I've put together several kit guitars and completed a number of refinishing projects, but I've never attempted a complete build from scratch before. Inspired by a bunch of YouTubers (#greatguitarbuildoff) I decided to buy some cheap lumber at my local big-box warehouse and see what I could do in my garage (#greatguitarbuildalong) with mostly just the tools I already have.

The design was primarily driven by what I had kicking around in my spare-parts bin. Some wrong-handed tuners from an old Partscaster, a couple of cheapie humbucker pickups from a kit, and miscellaneous electronics and controls (in addition to my rookie woodworking skills) suggested this simple layout. The body shape was inspired by PRS because I've always liked their double-cut profile. I chose a 24-3/4" scale length because it's pretty standard and the medium fretwire I had on hand (from an old acoustic refret project) works well at that scale.

By the time I was done with the build there were a couple of changes from the design, and the majority of those were even on purpose. Having already thought it out in CADD helped keep me on track.

It wasn't too long after bringing the lumber home that I made the first major change. Initially I was planning to build this as a set-neck guitar, where the neck and body are carved separately and then glued together. However the red oak board I found for the neck was in good enough shape and sufficiently long to laminate up as a neck-thru guitar. I divided the 9' board into 3' lengths, rotated them 90º, and glued them into a solid blank. The poplar body wings were built up from 1x6 material that I face-jointed with a hand plane and sandwiched together. Total cost for the warehouse-store lumber was $25.

My fretboard did not come from the warehouse store. At first I was planning to make my own fretboard from a piece of 1/4" red oak, but I quickly realized that none of my tools would be suitable for cutting fret slots of the proper width and depth. To speed things along for this build I ordered a piece of rosewood from an online supplier and had them slot and radius the blank before shipping it to me. It arrived in plank form, so I still had to profile it and trim it to the proper length at the nut and heel. That was another $25.

Beneath the fretboard is a truss rod. It lays snugly in a channel carved down the center of the neck blank and provides a mechanical way to adjust the amount of bow in the neck after it's been strung to playing tension. As familiar as I am with the purpose and function of truss rods from years of tech-ing for myself and friends, I'd never actually seen one. I bought the least costly one I could find online and set about making the channel with my router. Going slowly and working up to the final slot dimension helped me avoid any major issues.

With that done I set up my router table as a crude jointer to prepare the body wings for gluing to the neck blank. That task (or rather my momentary inattention to it) was responsible for the only injury I sustained during the build--the tip of my left ring finger just grazed the top of the spinning router bit which took a nasty little bite. I'm fortunate it wasn't worse, and I made some safety improvements to both the router table and my techniques for all of the following work. The body wings glued up nicely, and then I traced my templates (not pictured, I made them from 1/4" plywood) for the headstock and body shapes and rough-cut them out with a hand-held jigsaw. Slow going for sure, but it gave an acceptable cut.

At this point in the project I laid out the bits and pieces to take stock of what I had on hand and what might need to be ordered. Most of this was already in my bin, but I needed a set of humbucker rings to mount the pickups, and I didn't have the bridge yet. I also needed some string ferrules for the back which hadn't arrived at the time of this photo. Those items together added another $25 to the project cost. Since the parts were a mix of gold and chrome finishes I was pretty lucky to find that two-tone bridge with a chrome plate and brass saddles, and it was an extra happy accident that all of the plastics and springs and fasteners were black.

Everything else was ready to go. The only other modification I needed to make was for the control knobs. The pair from my bin were metric (probably came off an import Tele-style guitar years ago) and were ever-so-slightly too small to fit the shafts of the Bourns potentiometers. I wrapped them in several layers of tape then held them firmly in a pair of vise-grips while I slowly drilled out the mounting holes until they reached the proper diameter. A drill press would've been faster, but I don't think I could've done any better than I did with my hand drill. A very pleasant win.

I still would need truss-rod access and control cavity covers, but I had an idea for those.

Next step was to route all the necessary cavities for pickups and controls. I also located the bridge and drilled the holes for the mounting screws as well as the top holes where the strings run through the body. The back-side string holes were drilled separately and countersunk for ferrules. I drilled and reamed holes for the tuner, control knobs, and switch; and I pre-drilled for the strap buttons at this stage, too.

Then I temporarily installed the strap buttons so I could hold the guitar in playing position and mark the contour on the back the carve away some of the body for what's known as a "tummy cut". I also marked contours on the top for a forearm carve and a bit of relief in the treble horn area to make playing the higher frets a little more comfortable. All of those body carves were done with the hand rasp in this picture--highly laborious and slow, but also fairly precise. I'm pleased with how they look and feel.

In my original design I was planning to inlay a standard pattern of dots for face-markers on the fretboard, but when my piece of rosewood arrived I liked the red color and the grain so much that I decided not to do any inlay at all. Totally wasn't because I was scared of ruining it and/or running out of time. :D

But even without face dots I'd need side markers on the fretboard, so I laid them out, drilled some small holes, and glued in round hardwood toothpicks. When the glue was dry I cut them flush and sanded it smooth. They came out perfect, and that's when I got overconfident and decided to try a single dot marker at the 12th fret on the face. Somehow I drilled the recess for the inlay off center by a good 1/8", and the small wood plug I inlaid looked terrible. It needed a fix, but you can't undo an inlay.

So I came up with an idea to enlarge it, and rather than put a big boring circle of wood in there I took inspiration from another design cue I'd already settled on. The mix of gold and chrome hardware kind of reminded me of an Iron Man suit, so I decided that I'd paint the whole guitar red. Well that led me to the idea of an arc-reactor for the 12th fret inlay, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The inlay itself is a sandwich of aluminum tape backing, laser-printed waterslide decal, and a blue-tinted acrylic gem I bought at the hobby store. I shaped the gem and layered it all up with superglue before expanding the recess in the fretboard and gluing in the sandwich. Once it had fully set I carved the acrylic flush to the fretboard and polished it. Not perfect but loads better than that first effort.

Time for frets. I used regular nickel-silver medium fretwire because that's what I already had leftover from a previous project. The wire was already curved to a radius slightly tighter than my fretboard surface, so I didn't have to do much prep. I just cut the wire to slightly oversize for each fret slot and kept them in order by sticking them to a long strip of masking tape.

At this stage the back of the neck was still flat and square even though I'd already removed some of the bulk material to get it down closer to the final thickness. That allowed me to brace underneath with a simple block of scrap wood to give a firm surface for hammering in the frets. I used a plastic mallet head with firm strikes to drive each fret in at the ends, then I followed that with hammering down the center until it was flush to the fretboard all along it's length. Repeat 21 times.

I didn't add any glue to the slots before fretting. Instead I got them all seated properly first, then I wicked in some thin superglue from each side until the slots were filled beneath the tang of the fretwire. Tap test was good, all frets are solid. With that done I could use a regular file to carefully flush the fret ends to the side of the fretboard, then I taped that same file to a block of 2x6 cut at a 30º angle and ran it up and down each side until all the fret ends were equally beveled. A bit of sandpaper softened the harsh edges, and that concluded fret installation. The rest of the fretwork would be done during the initial setup.

The final step in the woodworking was the one I was simultaneously most dreading and looking forward to--carving the neck. I'd never done this before, and the tool I ordered to make this process a little easier failed to arrive. Rather than order another one and wait even longer I got to work with the same coarse rasp I had used on the body contours. The red oak took a lot longer to shape than the poplar, but it was still better than waiting for a tool to (maybe) get delivered.

Before the rasp, however, I needed to get the thickness set. For this I made a crude router sled and set the cutter at my desired height above the thickness I wanted at the 12th fret. Then I made a shim to raise the nut by .070" so that the neck thickness would taper slightly from nut to heel. It worked great.

I drew out a rough idea of what I wanted the neck profile to be at both the nut and the 12th fret, then I measured how much of each corner to remove and transferred those marks to the back of the neck. That gave me my first facets to carve with the rasp. I repeated the same steps of reducing corners to facets, eventually switching to a file when the work was too fine for the rasp. I was constantly feeling the neck along it's entire length to find any spots that needed more work, and after a few hours I was pretty confident with it.

The next day I came back to it refreshed and found a few more places that needed smoothing. It definitely paid off to take a break and get some rest before finishing up. If I had stopped with it at "rough-draft" then it wouldn't have been as good, and if I had tried to push through with the "final-draft" all at once then I probably would've ruined it.

With the woodworking complete I spent a couple of days just sanding. Sanding sucks, but the quality of the final finish is absolutely most dependent on this crucial step, even if using an opaque paint. After sanding I applied a couple coats of an epoxy finishing resin as a sanding sealer and grain filler. I probably should've done a few more coats but I was getting impatient--each coat takes a day and requires more sanding between coats.

Once I was satisfied with the sealer I did a quick mockup to check how well everything had stayed aligned. The wires on the outer edges showed that my bridge position was dead on and didn't need to be altered. They were just tool wire, not guitar strings, so they couldn't be tuned to pitch; but with a bit of tension on them they still made the first sounds on this guitar, and the way it resonated when plucked was really satisfying. I couldn't wait any longer to get it finished.

But I'd have to wait at least a couple of weeks while I worked my way through all the painting steps. First was a couple coats of primer with more sanding. That revealed a few surface flaws, but I ignored them and powered on through two more coats of red paint applied with my HVLP setup. That resulted in a few drips that I cursed and then sanded out when dried. With those fixed I applied two more light coats of red with my airbrush and left it to dry for a couple of day.

When the color coats were dry I applied my custom headstock decal (one that I've used on a number of kit guitar build over the years). After giving that a day to dry I mixed a pint of two-component urethane gloss clear and applied two coats with my HVLP. Then I hung it for a week to cure.

To make the truss-rod-access and control-cavity covers I bought a sheet of clear acrylic and cut out the shapes I'd need. After refining them to proper fit I painted the reverse sides of each piece and then sealed them. I think they came out fairly smashing, and it only cost a few bucks to do it this way rather than buying a sheet of typical plastic cover material. So far they seem to be durable enough.

When I was confident that the clear coat was ready I wet-sanded the entire guitar with 1000-grit to level out all the orange peel, and then I continued wet-sanding all the way up through 2500 grit. Once that was done I used a foam polishing pad in my drill with a succession of rubbing and polishing compounds followed by a final pass with scratch and swirl remover to buff the clear coat to a glossy shine.

After buffing I applied a thin coat of wax to all the painted surfaces. Then it was ready for assembly!

I taped off the fretboard and levelled, crowned, and polished the frets. Then I unmasked the fretboard and gave it a good coat of mineral oil. I installed the nut and the tuners before turning my attention to the body hardware and electronics.

My custom decal is a rip-off of Fender's logo from back when I built myself a few kit Partscasters. That was fun at the time, but now that I'll be working on guitars of my own design I want to come up with something more unique.

Down at the body I installed the bridge and string through ferrules (on the back) along with the strap buttons. After the hardware was on I installed the pickups and the control-cavity electronics. The wiring scheme is dead simple--there's no fancy switching or push-pull splits--so with everything installed it was a quick matter to solder all the connections and test the electronics. I think this is the first time I've ever wired a switch correctly on the first attempt, so that's another minor win.

Pickups passed their tap test and the knobs and switch were all behaving properly, so all that was left was to install the strings and do a full setup. I made all the necessary adjustments to get it close to playing shape, then I let it sit for a few days to acclimate under string tension and relax into a stable geometry. Then I spent a couple of hours really dialing in the neck relief, playing action, and intonation until I had it just where I wanted it. Last thing was to install the covers and take it for an initial spin.

The final result has kept me grinning for weeks now. It's nothing special in the guitar world, but it turned out so much better than I dared to hope, especially given the bargain-basement level of most of its parts (only the potentiometers are of notable quality) to say nothing of my budding builder skills. I'm absolutely thrilled to have a guitar that I love to play but which isn't so precious that I'm scared to play it.

And even though I didn't do this to compete with the Great Guitar Build Off challengers, I still owe that whole enterprise a hearty "Thanks!" for making 2020 a little more bearable and inspiring me to join in with all the fun. Hopefully I'll be able to enter my next build in the 2021 edition!