Guitar-b-que 09!

So last Saturday we held our "Guitar-b-Que". We decided to have an open house to cut strat or tele bodies for people all day. Along with cutting bodies we drug out the Weber, cleared out some space in the front office for amps and threw a party!

Everything started here. You could see in my last post that Dave, Steve and I prepped a bunch of material. Dave and I spent most of the following week sending bodies through the wide belt to get them completely prepped.
Around 9:30 people started straggling in and sorting through blanks. I made some guides that showed the tooling path of the CNC.
Here is where I spent ALL day... standing in front of the CNC.
Strat style body about half way run. While this was going on the BBQ was fired up and food started to be cooked.


This made Charlie quite happy
She even made a new friend!
People scarfing down on some food
Guitars were EVERYWHERE! (keen eyes will notice the strat on the right is the "CourtneyCaster"
While everyone was enjoying some food Dad was flush trimming and edge routing bodies.
Cleaning up the neck pocket.
Running the round over

Then it was off to the dreaded part. Everyone was responsible for sanding their own bodies.
sanding.... so much sanding!

Now the REAL party room was our front office. The day before we gave it a much needed cleaning out and freed up some space for people to bring amps to try.
Mike from www.phatdaddyguitarworks.com came down with a Greer Amplification Thunderbolt 30. UNBELIEVABLE amp, already have one on order!
The black and wheat amp in the back corner is my new Greer Oktal Grinder. Another fantastic amp from Nick Greer!
Soon the guys from Brownnote showed up with 3-4 fantastic amps in tow and soon the "amp room" was so crowded you could barely stand in there!!
My Firebird got A LOT of play time during the day!
Dad and Charlie the Shop Dog
More people hanging out by the CNC watching their bodies run.
More Dad working hard. I have to say, Dad, Steve, Dave and even my wife and my mom worked their ARSES off during the day. We couldn't have done it with out their help.

After the BBQ the bar that Dave and I play at weekly hosted a jam for us. Unfortunetly only a few pictures turned out.

"Good night Sacramento, we love you!"

We did get some video though! Steve posted a lot of videos to his youtube account.. check them out!! Just don't hold my playing against me... I badly sliced 3 finger tips on my left hand during the bbq and was playing with band aids on!

Guitar-b-que

WAY behind on updates here. I've been lagging partially because there hasn't been a ton to show. Sealer and grain filling has been on the Firebird's but they are waiting for paint. Joes Thunderbird is cut out, I'll update that in a separate post.

In the mean time, we are having a BIG BBQ at the shop for guitar building hobbyists like ourselves. We stocked up on material and we'll be running bodies all day. Steve and I went out and picked up a truck load (literally) of Mahogany and Alder. Today, Steve, Dave and I started cleaning up the material and gluing them into billets.

ROUGH Mahogany. This is one of my favorite parts of woodworking... running nasty looking wood through the planner.

Steve and I are doing a light cleanup, getting the material down to about 1.85" thick.

Rough Mahogany in, clean Mahogany out :D

This is how we straight line. The jig at the front basically pinches the the board in, works really well. Nice thing is I can straight-line 10' boards here with out hassle.

I did have a couple 12 footers though, I chopped 2 feet out of them to straight-line separately.

Doug: "What does that mean?"
Dave: "Kauer Custom Instruments, duh!"

Once everything has been straight lined I run them back through the planer on edge to true the edges.

After the edges are trued, we started cutting them to length.

FILLED the rack with materials!

We only have so many clamps in the shop so we'd glue 2 billets at a time.

Steve digging through all the blanks to match them up into nice two piece bodies.

And there we go... All of the Mahogany ones are glued, a few of the alder ones started. Tomorrow we'll get another 10-12 alder ones glued up. After this everything goes through the widebelt till they are perfectly flat.

-d