Building a Bass w/ FREE WOOD from the JUNK PILE (with minimal tools)! OSB and 2x4's DIY guitar

[Music] today i am going to go searching through a scrap pile to find the cheapest and most readily available wood to build the guitar from you can find scrap 2x4s and scrap osb all the time this stuff here so be really excited if i can actually make a guitar out of this [Music] stuff all right so i for some reason am absolutely fixated on building a guitar or base out of the cheapest and most readily available oh i just saw my hat in the camera look at how cool this thing is these are available on my website guns guitars.net back to what i was saying today i am going to go searching through a scrap pile to find the cheapest and most readily available wood to build the guitar from now i do have access to a scrap pile of barn wood here but i feel like the barn wood guitar has been done to death and so i'm not really after that and lots of people in the united states and all over the world don't actually have access to reclaimed barn wood but what i feel like everyone has access to are two by fours and osb whether you purchase it just at your local hardware store or if you know of a construction site or something you can find scrap 2x4s and scrap osb all the time i'm looking around for two by fours sorry if i'm making you dizzy here we go we got some two by fours here so i just gotta find these are pretty weathered still might be kind of cool though got some nail holes and stuff well something there will work and then i think i saw some scrap osb around here somewhere this stuff here do i want extra weathered semi-weathered or semi fresh cut i think i'll probably go with the fresh cut stuff and that's gonna be my top i think yeah now i just need to go ask permission if i can have this wood because this is not my property i'm just camping here luke yo give me some wood kind of wood i'm gonna scrap pal good okay cool permission granted [Music] [Music] all right so today i'm going to get to gluing my boards together and i'm mooch docking off of the side of my father-in-law's house right here and i thought it was super funny because i was really stressed at my last spot like i need to get this lumber for this build and i show up to my father-in-law's house and there's like scrap to buy lumber and osb all over the place so just proof again that these materials are readily available so be really excited if i can actually make a guitar out of this stuff so i finished sanding these all down and the edges squared out pretty well but these are definitely far from true now the right way to do this is to use a table saw or thickness planer to get all the edges perfectly true so that when everything glues together it glues together you know with perfect engagement so if you have access to those things of course that's the right way to do it but i actually do have access to those things being at my father-in-law's house right now but for the sake of this video i'm not going to i'm just going to match these up the best that i can and i'm just gonna glue them together uh with some clamps just as is and i'm gonna just be relying on a lot of glue and a lot of wood filler to fill in all the gaps so this looks like it's probably gonna be my best bet i'm a little nervous about this piece right here so i'm going to sand a little bit in the middle there it's actually let's go ahead and mark where i'm going to sand that down there we go it's actually not too bad of a system orbital is a very productive sander so if you're going to do it the wrong way or the dan thompson ways i call it use an orbital that'll work let's go ahead and glue this together again not doing this correctly because i don't have big huge clamps to glue them all together i just have the clamps that came with my workbench and they are only long enough to do three pieces so i'll glue up three and then two and then i'll somehow mash the two together i think i'll go ahead and do the two first just so i can get a feel for all this gluing stuff [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] while that glue is drying and clamped i'm gonna go ahead and start working on my design i'm gonna do a base and i've always wanted to see what a fender meteora looks like as a base so that's going to be my inspiration for this build it's not going to be an exact copy stupid wind because i'm going to draw it out freehand so i'm not using any sort of template other than the one that i'm going to make right here [Music] here's my awesome high quality kmis 50 amazon base neck and we are just going to kind of doodle up body design [Music] all right so there we have it i think i'm done playing with it for now it's not quite a true meteora that's okay i don't necessarily want to blatantly rip off someone else's design so the offset isn't quite as exaggerated and this bottom part isn't quite as pointy but i like where this is going so i'm going to go ahead and start fiddling with it for now took me about an hour to do this so needless to say i think my i can remove my clamps from my other wood and start clamping up the other chunk [Music] all right now i've come up with an extremely overly complicated and elaborate plan of how i'm going to attach these two blocks of wood together and it's going to involve setting this thing up in these clamps and then i'm going to glue this other piece down on top like this and then i'm going to tighten it down with a ratchet strap listen there's the right way the wrong way in the dan thompson way which is really just the wrong way but faster [Applause] [Music] so [Music] probably the number one thing about my great guitar build off submission that everybody loved was the headstock so that was actually my main inspiration for this project was i wanted to take another crack at it because the great guitar build off happened so fast it was such a blur and i pretty much eyeballed all the measurements and i don't even remember how i did it but what i do remember is that i learned some things about that headstock now i'm super proud of how it turned out i think it turned out amazing you guys absolutely loved it but i think there are some ways that it could be improved still and i think there are some ways that i want to be able to streamline the process you know use actual measurements instead of eyeballing everything so i'm not going to bore you with the details of how i came up with these measurements or this new design that i'm going to try out but really i just wanted to streamline the process and figure out a way that i could repeat it easier and also come up with some different designs because the other one was very sort of heavy looking and this one i think is going to be a little bit more light and airy looking which should match i think the body style a little bit better so [Music] do [Music] [Music] look at this mess we have here tons of glue again you got a thickness planer it's going to make this job a lot faster but all i got is an orbital and a lot of 60 grit sanding discs so let's get started i have a feeling this is going to be the piece that i'm going to glue the top onto since it has the most defects but i'm going to stand up both and just see which one looks nicer [Music] so don't mind me just sanding my life away today's the day we are going to glue the osb onto my plank of two by fours i've got six cheap harbor freight clamps standing by i also have two extremely heavy toolboxes yeah i'm just gonna add a ton of glue to the back side of the osb everywhere as much as possible and then i'm going to flip it over clamp it down in the spots that are not even around the perimeter and then place my big heavy tool boxes in the middle to just really squeeze out the excess glue and get as firm of engagement as possible so hopefully this works and as i cut out my body if i find little gaps in the glue or whatever that's what the wood filler's for as long as it's structurally sound that's all i really care about so we'll go ahead and let this dry pretty much all day so i'm sort of going to jump forward a step i traced out my body and normally i would just cut this out if this was normal wood this isn't normal wood this is osb and the problem with working with osb is that these little wafers they tend to peel up and chip and tear out whenever you're cutting or routing them so to make kind of the rest of this a little bit easier i'm going to go ahead and do my grain filling now my grain filler is going to be a little bit different recipe than i would typically do if i was just filling an open grain on some wood i'm going to start with just some all-purpose sandable stainable wood filler and normally i would mix in some stain just to make the grain the color that i want it to be so i will be doing that but in order to help kind of glue down these wafers i'm going to need to mix in a gluey substance so i'm going to be mixing in a polyurethane i just found that once i did that this stuff was so much easier to work with now it's not going to fix all the problems with tear out and wafers peeling some of that's still going to happen but it is going to make my life a whole heck of a lot easier to keep the recipe not super complicated i'm going to go ahead and use this poly shade which is a stain and poly that's already mixed to the perfect ratio and then i'm just going to mix that with the wood filler until i get the perfect consistency that i want and that consistency really is just going to be sort of a thick syrupy substance that i can press into all these little gaps and holes and then the polyurethane we're going to let it cure and it's going to harden and it's going to help keep those wafers down while i jigsaw out this body design route for pickup cavities all that kind of stuff [Music] [Music] [Music] all right look at how this came out i am very happy for not having the right stuff for not being able to true up the two by fours for not you know having a planer not having the right clamps i mean this looks like one solid chunk of wood here um there are pretty much no gaps i was nervous there were going to be a ton of gaps between my top and the two by fours there's only really two there's a little bit right there and a little bit right there both of which i'm just going to have to fill in with some wood filler which i honestly had anticipated on doing a lot more than just those two spots so overall i'm feeling really good you can see i only had minimal tear out of these wafers so i think doing that grain filling first was helpful it was really just the really tight spots or the spots where i put it on really thin where the parts that tore out and so i'm going to be rounding that over anyway and like i said i'm going to do the grain fill again so it's going to be nice and smooth but i'm going to leave it like this until i get everything done all the pickup routes and the bridge placement and all that stuff because i expect to have more tear out so i'm going to go ahead and leave this as is until it's time to finish it and then we'll do it again i also got to say that cutting all this out only took me about 15 minutes i mean probably a little bit less and that's including drilling the extra holes to get my jigsaw in there so just something to consider yeah a bandsaw would have been faster but how much faster five minutes maybe even 10 minutes is it worth the expense if you're building guitars all day every day yeah it's worth the expense you'll make that money back in your time eventually but if this is just a hobby you can certainly get by with a jigsaw now i'm going to take my 60 grit disc and just clean up these sides a little bit especially these corners [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] now i know i'm gonna get a lot of comments people telling me that i routed this p pickup cavity upside down because traditionally you would see it like this right i did that on purpose because the way i'm designing my pick guard i want it to cover up that extra space to really streamline it a bit so it should look just like a standard i don't know single coil guitar pickup without having this little extra part right here where they have to solder the wires on so and now that i've got my template cut out of cardstock and go ahead and make my wood pick guard i'm not going to show you guys how i do that because i have a video dedicated to it so i'm just gonna knock that out real quick and then we'll get back to you finishing this thing now you're gonna finally get to see what i'm trying to do here with the osb and the wood grain filler as i'm calling it [Music] [Applause] so you can see how the grain filler just filled in all the little tiny gaps in between the wood and this just looks beautiful this is exactly how i was hoping it would turn out the only issue is of course we did have some more tear out so where this should feel like glassy smooth there's just a few little tiny spots that need to be patched so i'm going to grain fill the whole thing again [Music] do [Music] do that looks pretty good now time for some 120 grits [Music] now it's very important when you're hand sanding osb that you sand it with the grain and in this case the grain is that direction [Music] now that it's all sanded we can stain it i'm going to do the back and sides with minwax true black and then the top i'm going to do some water-based rit dies i do really like the look of the black stain and it's going to really allow us to still see that this was made out of two by fours i really want to show that off because that to me is the coolest part about this build is just knowing that it's made out of completely junk pile [Music] [Applause] [Music] wood so because of my extreme distaste for sanding uh i'm trying out another accessory it's right here it's a little like velcro on kind of spongy pad i love the orbital but one of the shortcomings is that it works best on flat surfaces curved surfaces not so much so this sponge i think is going to really help it [Music] contour [Music] oh my goodness that's amazing that's incredible that this one time was worth this purchase oh that's so amazing so amazing you know i'm gonna put on a 320 pad and i think i'm gonna do this [Music] neck i don't know why they don't come with these from the factory this is so much better oh i'm so happy about these all of these transitions this right here this right here down at the heel so smooth oh i love this this is wonderful sides and back are stained with that oil-based minwax and now i'm gonna do the front with just black liquid rip tie [Music] now time for a little bit of cherry red [Music] sort of the last thing before i put my clear coat finish on this you guys know that i always like to sort of make my guitars look a little worn out or a little broken in so i'm gonna attempt to do that hopefully i don't ruin this because this is beautiful i wonder if i could dye the grain on this give it an orange tint that looks pretty cool let's try that since i sanded it back a little bit it did expose a little bit of bare wood where that green is that's good i've never done that i've never done a water-based dye on top of an oil-based stain but i gotta say i like the results [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] all right so today i'm going to do something that's probably considered a big no-no in the guitar fretwork business and that's i'm not going to do any sandpaper i'm just going to go straight from the fret file to polishing and doing that for a couple of reasons one i mentioned that this is sort of an experimental base i don't plan to sell it i just want to try out some new ideas on it and so i am just going to see if i can get a good plain base even if the frets aren't super perfectly mirror polished shiny and so as long as it still operates smoothly i think it'll be just fine so they may not be as pretty but going straight to polishing at least it'll make these smooth parts where the strings touching nice and smooth and hopefully i don't know we'll just see we'll find out so as long as i'm breaking all the rules i might as well just go the full distance i tried another new idea and that's where i just took my cloth polishing wheel from my dremel and i went across after i was done i didn't add any more compound but i just whatever was left on there i used to polish all the fret ends usually i just sanded them with 320 and that makes them good enough but this gave me really good smooth results that i love it's a big no-no because you can see that i just really dirtied up this edge of the fretboard but i kind of like the look of it it looks kind of worn out kind of toasted i don't care if something looks ugly as long as it's extremely functional and if this gets me perfect results while looking a bit ugly why not right so i didn't really film myself doing the poly finish on this thing and because that's just boring who wants to watch me rub paulie on a guitar body but when i was lightly sanding between coats to get this smooth satin non-glossy finish to make it look more like the wood that it's made out of you guys know that i'm a huge fan of guitars that are made of wood i think should look and feel like they're made of wood but i decided to take that uh worn out look to the next level and sorry i didn't film this but i just sanded right around these contoured areas to give a little separation of color between the black and the orange and i wasn't super happy with how the finish was turning out up until that point and i feel like that was what it really needed so i ended up doing it to the pick guard as well you can see that i kind of highlighted the edges just by running some sandpaper along it and that really makes it pop a bit more and then i didn't feel like the neck really matched all that much so i ended up adding a little bit of color to kind of make the neck look a little more worn out to kind of match headstock i think turned out awesome it's kind of take two on my great guitar build off design and this thing is really coming together so i'm excited today i get to assemble it and for the wiring on this thing it's going to be really complicated i got a single pickup going to a single output jack that's right i'm not going to do a volume or tone on this one as a bass player i don't ever use my volume and tone i have a tuner pedal that i use to mute myself when i don't want to play but other than that i don't ever use a volume or a tone i know it's just me personally but i'm not building this base to sell i'm building it for me and so i'm not going to waste time on that if i want to add a second bridge pickup later on down the road i can always add that wiring later i've got enough room to put in a couple volume pots um or a selector switch or something so no problems there but yeah just uh hot and ground to the output jack and then a ground to the bridge [Music] done [Music] [Applause] [Music] so once i have this thing fully assembled i realized that the translucent finish on the pickguard just wasn't doing it for me i think the wood grain was just a little bit too busy for the chaos of the osb so at the opinion of my wife and those in my guitar secret facebook vip group we decided collectively that a solid black finish would really just tie this together so i went ahead and stripped off the translucent black minwax stain and i ended up putting on that black poly shade that i used for the grain filler and then going around the edges of it with some sandpaper to make it pop like i did before and then also using that sandpaper to distress it kind of relic it a little bit and that was what this base really needed to tie it all together i mean you got a matte black pickup matte black block inlays we got the matte black and the headstock it really just ties it all together you also notice that i used a fender stratocaster style output jack and i mounted it upside down from what you're used to seeing and that's because every professional musician that i know ties relief of their cable through their straps so it actually makes more sense for it to be upside down you know sort of a form follows function thing i don't know why they've never updated that now in this video i intentionally didn't tell you anything about this pickup right here and that's because this pickup is a very cool special pickup that deserves a video in and of itself so if you want to see what kind of 51p style pickup i used and you want to hear just a pure tone sound demo stick around because i'll be uploading that video next week also if you have a real keen eye you'll notice that this bridge is actually the same type of bridge i used on my great guitar build off build and i want to do a dedicated review video to this bridge as well because it's super innovative it's not very common for there to be a leap in electric guitar technology right especially when it comes to bass we've been doing the same thing for like 60 years so having this completely newly designed innovative bridge is a super game changer for us bass players and i can't wait to make a dedicated video to that as well so stick around i'm dan this is guns guitars and i'll see you in those videos

Channel: Guns and Guitars

Views: 60,179

Keywords:

Id: r6Ar2qn5ZO8

Length: 30min 24sec (1824 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020