Master Templates

Well, if you're anything like me, every now and again you just gotta get your best scratchy cough out and call into work so you can take the day off to build guitars in your back yard. I did that yesterday and, let me tell you, it's a hell of a good feeling. Not gonna let the man hold me down. (Who's w/ me!?) My task for the day was to get a couple templates done for a couple elements of my next guitar. Last time, I made the mistake of building all of these things into the template for the guitar. This is very convenient for one project but makes it a little more troublesome when you move onto the next shape and have to do everything all over again. This time, I'm made each element on a different piece of mdf for greater versatility.

The two pieces I made were for a humbucker rout and for a tele-style neck pocket. These will be common elements on guitars I make in the future so this will equal a lot of time saved. I made these on quarter inch mdf this time. Last time, I used three quarter inch and it was a beast to shape and very frustrating to get accurate.

The first step is to draw everything out very carefully w/ a straight edge and a carpeneters square. I got the measurements I needed from various places online. This took me about an hour and half. For the last project I didn't have this kind of patience but now that I know I can pull it off, it's easier to reach down into the depths of my psyche to find another five minutes of attention span to erase a line and redraw more accurately.

This is the neck pocket:


I made the top of it extend an inch longer than it had to be. Hopefully, this will give the router something better to rest on when I use it so I can better control it. There's lines drawn so I can get it in the right place.

Same deal w/ the humbucker routt:


Ultimately, it was a mistake to cut it out so small, at least before I had the middle cut out. It made it really hard to clamp down as I worked on it:


It was too small for me to use a jigsaw so I had to use a coping saw. As seen in the picture above, I drilled out the corners w/ a handbill so I could turn the blade. The initial cut was none to accurate:


But some time w/ a file got it in good shape pretty quickly (I actually filed it a bit more from this point and it looks very clean now):


Same deal w/ the neck pocket only this time I could use the jigsaw to save time (and I'm actually more accurate w/ that than a coping saw). It is nearly perfect:


This all came together a lot quicker and better than previous efforts so I'm pretty pleased. The only problem w/ using the quarter inch thick mdf is it's really too thin to use directly on a guitar so I will need this to make some thicker templates. It's worth the extra effort for the added accuracy.

Finishing the Templates (Finally)

Well, I figure it's a bout time I get it over w/ and finish up these templates, given that there's not much else to do until I'm done w/ them. All I have left is to make the holes to rout out the pickup and control cavities. The process is super simple. Do the rough cut w/ a jigsaw (drilling holes first so you can get started and turn the blade at corners) and file away until you are really, really, really bored of filing/

Cut w/ the jigsaw (notice the corner holes):



And you wind up w/ something like this and a lot of filing to do:



These files are actually pretty cool. They used to be my grandfather's so I guess you can call them heirlooms. Either way, they work rather well but slowly especially on my thick sheet of MDF:


It took me a hell of a long time to get them reasonably square. It sucked but it beats the hell out of not building your own guitars so there you go. Here's how it ended up:


The pickup slots are about exactly the size of the pickups. Of course, they need to be a bit wider than that so I'm going to set up my router in such a way that it adds an extra sixteenth or an eighth of an inch around the edges. Hopefully, that will do the trick. I will be damned if I do any more filing on this template.

Further Neck Pocketing

It rained here today so I figure I'd get some work done on my templates w/ a coping saw. I had intended to cut the neck pocket part of the template that way anyway, figuring I'd get greater accuracy w/ that than I did w/ the jigsaw. Turns out I was buck nuts. Behold! the inaccuracy of my coping saw cut:


I drilled holes of the same radius as the corners of a telecaster neck pocket so that I could get those pretty exact. I also needed them so I could turn the saw. The cut ended up pretty rough to say the least. Still, it only took an hour or so w/ a file to get it just about perfect. I continually used the butt of the neck to check its size. You can see here when it's pretty close:


It took quite a while but I'm pretty confident everything is correctly shaped. Once I was done, I clamped the templates together and, using the file again, shaped the template for the overall shape of the guitar to match the neck perfectly. It's at the point where it's not quite force fit but in there good and snug, which I understand is what you want. It's tight enough that the neck will stay in there w/ no support (not that I would want to set a pint of beer on it or anything):


The file was really awesome to work w/. In hindsight, it would have been the right tool for shaping the MDF rather than the power sanders I used. It worked both faster and more accurately. I used it a bit more on the template to iron out some of the asymmetries and have a feeling it will see heavy use fine tuning the actual body as well once I get it routed.