Thunderbird...

Joe's Thunderbird blank sanded to thickness. Sure is gonna be purdy

Thunderbird...

Just a quickie. Got the wing blanks glued onto Joes Thunderbird today. As cold as it is right now the squeeze out takes quite a while to dry... might not get sanded till thursday.

shopsmith

I recently picked up an old Shopsmith MKV for free. We tore it apart last week, cleaned it up and started using it as our new drill press and horizontal boring machine (amongst other things...).

Here is my tele output jack alignment jig. Screws down to the table and indexes the bodies for drilling.

Here is a body on the machine ready to be drilled.

And the final product. Not bad for a 50 year old machine!

tele's

Just a few tele's in the rack right now... most of these are going out including the left handed one (first lefty I've gotten to make!!). The crummy cell phone shots don't do it justice, the lefty one has just gorgeous grain.

Building Joe's Thunderbird

As I mentioned in an earlier post Im building a Thunderbird for a friend of mine.

Started with a large blank of lightly skimmed African Mahogany.

Joe's is a little more involved since he wanted to do the Walnut strips like the Gibson's have. So I cut the mahogany into strips and grabbed some Walnut to do the neck section.

Here she is all glued up. Next things to do are chop the headstock out of it, attach the blanks to form the wings and sand it all to thickness. Then it'll be time to go on the cnc machine!

firebird cont...

Here I am back cutting a neck. This seems to speed things along pretty well when it comes to the final shaping.

There we go... pile of back cut firebirds. Next up: Cutting fretboards.

So now that the intro is out of the way I thought we'd get caught up on the last couple weeks projects. I've decided that one Firebird simply isn't enough so I picked up another 24' of 8/4 African Mahogany. I am building a couple for friends and a Thunderbird for a friend.

I do the vast majority of my machining on our in house SCMI Tech99 CNC (Point to Point technically) router. The machine is from the mid 90's so its pretty antiquated by today's standards... but I can trick it into doing some of the more complicated things (like doing the radius on fretboards ect).

So I forgot to take pictures from raw wood stage but this as bodies started coming off the machine.

First batch coming off the CNC. From left to right its: My FirebirdJR, my Firebird VII (3x P90's), Daves Firebird VII (Mini Buckers), Dad's Firebird V (2 full size humbuckers) and my Firebird VII (3 fullsize 'buckers)


Now there are 2 more firebirds here... both for Nick Greer (www.greeramps.com). Though I accidently routed the trussrod to deep on one of them so I glued in a maple strip before rerouting. I actually think this is a blessing in disguise to help reinforce the neck.

All done waiting for the next step!

So this is the next step. What I do is back cut the necks to (more or less) the final thickness I want the neck to end up. What I do is build a couple jigs that have the amount of rise I want (in this case .15") to taper.

Since one of these is Dad's after all... and he was down at the shop anyways, I decided he had to do some of the leg work.

I guess its time to start this

Hello everyone! I figured I might as well start "blogging" my various projects and such. First a little back story- I've been playing guitar for the last 10 years. My main job is doing custom cabinetry in the family business (www.kauerkreations.com) so I don't know I didn't think of building guitars till the last couple years.

This is the first guitar I started actually 3 years ago... I still haven't finished it because I keep going off on other projects.



That's as far as that one has gotten... its chambered Walnut and Maple. Its got a Warmoth neck but I did everything else. Part of why I've been procrastinating on this guitar is I learned a lot of valuable lessons on it and maybe thats why I haven't completely finished it yet.

In the mean time I've done a few others:





So those were the first few I got done. All of them have Allparts or Warmoth necks but same routine, I cut the bodies from scratch, do the paint ect. I know that some view this as cheating but the way I look at it, I could barely buy the materials for that price.

Right now I have a few projects that are various stages of finishing... they have been derailed by my new obession but that will come up in a bit.


Telecustom body I cut... painted in Ice Metallic Blue.


This one is chambered African Mahogany with a maple cap. One of these days I'll get around to finishing both those...

But here's the main reason those projects have been put on hold. This has become my new building obession:


Now... the building process for these is much longer than I care to do in one post. Since I dont want to back track that much I just happen to have 8 more (not ALL for me I swear!) going right now and Im still near the start. Thats where I'll start blogging those!

So there are more projects floating around, I'll get to them eventually!

-doug