DIY Guitar Challenge | I Like To Make Stuff

hey i'm bob and josh and i like to make stuff and today we're going to turn these into these [Music] today we're going to do something that we've talked about doing back and forth for a long time and actually josh has done before we're gonna make guitars but we're making two totally different kinds we're gonna go about it two totally different ways so we'll get into the specifics what are you gonna be doing i'm gonna make a bass guitar okay that's it that's it you said make it quick i'm gonna make a five-string bass guitar and i'm gonna primarily make mine on the cnc because i've done all this work in fusion 360. i've designed it i know exactly what i want and i'm gonna bite off more than i can chew and he's gonna be doing the neck the fretboard the body all of it i'm going to be doing just the body but i'm going to do a semi hollow body guitar so it's got some pockets on the inside of it i have no clue what i'm doing no experience here whatsoever we're both going to be using the same material the three of us with anthony bought a giant pile of cherry and it's rough sawn it's uh it needs a lot of work but we're going to first mill up some pieces and make some blanks and then we'll talk about the specifics of our guitars like bob said we're going to be using the rough sawn cherry this time instead of the walnut that we used last time but we're still going to use the jointer the planer and the table saw to mill it up to the right pieces that we need and all that stuff is covered in a bits video so if you haven't seen that be sure to go check it out let's get to it yeah there's a guitar called a fender starcaster that was out i think in the 70s and they didn't run for very long i've always thought they're really cool but i've never actually had access to play one or i've never even seen one up close they have reissued them since then but i still want to make my own there's two big things about this guitar in particular that are going to be difficult for me personally it's a semi hollow body so basically these two sections are hollow on the inside and it's an arch top so the top of the guitar is not flat it's got kind of a hump that comes up in the middle where all the pickups are so i'm going to have to figure out how to do that and i'm gonna do my best not to use the cnc i am gonna use the laser though so what i did here is i took an image from straight on of the guitar and i just traced the outer profile and i'm gonna use that as my profile guide and then i offset that in a little bit so i've got a couple of different stair steps i'm going to use those as templates to be able to route down steps in the top of the guitar and then i can smooth them out and make them a nice transition so this is the base that i designed in fusion 360. this is actually the second base that i'm going to be making like bob i designed a body for one previously and i used an aftermarket neck in electronics this time i'm challenging myself to do the entire thing so i've designed the body the fretboard and the neck so i'm going to be using the cnc and fusion 360's manufacturing cut paths to do all of these digitally i needed a lot of help designing my base from scratch because i'd never done it before i found a website called stewmac.com that offers a whole lot of guitar making products they have specific dimensions for the frets that i need the channel for the truss rod the bridge specifications there's so much good information on stumac besides just the products that they have if you're interested in making your own guitar or bass you can make one from a kit that they have you can get all the different components or tools definitely check out stupak.com they are amazing [Music] now i have two base bodies glued up right now as an insurance policy because i'm fairly confident in my ability to run the cnc job that i've created but just in case it screws up i don't want to be the end of the world so i have a backup i also have a backup neck blank i have this piece of cherry that's kind of buggered up at the top i think i can get what i need out of it but in case i can't i have this piece of maple as well [Music] this looks like a really weird piece i get that but this is the top of three templates that are going to be stacked up and i've cut this kind of keyway in the middle so that they can all line up so basically what i'm going to do is get these three stair steps use those as routing templates to cut in levels and then i'll smooth out those levels and that will give me the arch top now i do want to acknowledge something i have never made a guitar before i know there are lots of fantastic channels like crimson guitars tim suede does a bunch there's a bunch of instructional stuff out there so you don't necessarily have to tell me about it after the fact in the comments but if you are looking for exactly how to make a guitar from somebody who knows what they're doing you definitely want to check those out we'll put links down in the description these are the pieces that actually came out of this piece and to keep all of the templates aligned once i get my blank made up i'm going to actually glue these pieces to the blank like that and then i can lift the templates on and off of that little cross shape and that will keep them all concentric in the same place i'm scared to do this i'm gonna lie but we have another one that's a big bit oh snap hold on i have to turn on the spindle this video is sponsored by cove audio i'm really excited about that because they've got some fantastic bluetooth headphones that i've been wearing a lot lately i really enjoy them they also have a fantastic bluetooth speaker called the commuter now this is a really great sounding speaker it's better than all the other ones i've ever owned and one of the coolest things about it is that it sounds good like this but you can also split it in half and actually put these in different parts of your room and you get a much wider stereo field of audio not only that but each one of these has a subwoofer on it and so you get great bass out of something this size a single charge will get you eight hours of audio and you can take this thing anywhere it'll fit in a cup holder it fits in that part of your backpack where a water bottle goes i know it's hard to hear what these sound like over a microphone and speakers and all that stuff but trust me listen to this tons of bass out of that tiny little subwoofer they sound fantastic trust me these are absolutely worth the money and that discount code is pretty ridiculous sixty-seven percent off of the total cost of these be sure to go to coveaudio.com iltms use the code iltms and get 67 off go check them out [Music] i'm making my backup neck so this is the one that we cut earlier right where i would play uh is where it's gross so i'm just gonna go ahead and do the rest of it both sides on the maple neck [Music] [Music] just gonna hold this here for a while should fall asleep with my head on these pieces holding them down then you do the next talking point with one stuck to your forehead i've got the main keys glued down to this thing so now all of my templates here josh come over here let me show you this i made a key that's glued on here and that same key is cut out of all the different template pieces so theoretically i should be able to lock all of these in the same place on the center lever and my center line for the guitar is going to be flat here and all the curves will go away from that so we got that one to cut out the main outer we got this it looks like a garlic bulb as the first step up should go right there and then oh yeah so this one will be the actual flat yeah that should be a flat surface and then this one i cut last night for the neck routing template so this should all line up you know if they're on the keys correctly i should be able to use a router and cut out the pocket for a strat neck i didn't talk about this but i'm going to be using a pre-existing strat neck and in the future that can be something that i can rebuild from scratch make my own neck but still have the same pocket as a strat so my face stuff is ready to start routing but my body piece is still way too thick yeah and you had an idea for that i do because i'm using the cnc we have a massive three inch surfacing bit now rather than putting those through the jointer and the planer neither of them can take that that size of chunk of wood i can put yours and i can take the two of mine on the cnc and i can thickness plane them with this massive bit so even though you are using traditional tools i will come in and kind of take yours off on a little field trip to the cnc uh but this is super clever and it's it's really fortunate that the stratocaster has a lot of information online to be able and and use yeah yeah i actually found a website last night i'll put a link to it in the description but it had vector templates for everything about the stratocaster the outline the pockets all of the electronics pockets and all and measurements so if you just want to use the measurements to make your own you can or you can use those vectors to cut out templates to make your own strat they had a bunch of different guitars as well let's go over and get those pieces on the cnc to make them thinner and i will start [Music] routing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] it's looking good but what's the problem at this point so the problem is is that i made a silly mistake and i can visualize it with this previous one i didn't want to waste a bunch of time so i carved just around the profile on the underside this is exactly the same so right now these walls are holding up the neck from the spoil board so now i'm carving this side which looks great but as you can see right here this is the amount of material that is holding this whole thing in place is this much overlap so if i do the smoothing paths over here which i plan on doing and then a final contour to cut the whole thing out if i do this contour hopefully this material up here will be okay but if i do the contour the whole thing is going to like collapse because there's nothing underneath it i would take something that's this thickness and slide it through there so you've got something down and then don't do that contour do the smoothing pass and then come back with an exacto knife and cut through that and that's what i was thinking that i could do the contour hoping that the heel and the head will still have this amount of material which seems to be working okay and then i can like come back and cut that out on the bandsaw and then smooth it with some sand so just do the contour just do the content in here yeah that's what i think that'd be good what do you think tell us in the comments it'll be way too late but tell us in the comments tell me in the comments [Music] i've got the stair steps on and i think this is the right way to go although i've never really done this and i'm kind of thinking through it as i go but the idea is that this top center section that i drew out is going to be the flat part now i need to kind of smooth from this edge down to this edge so i'm going to have to come up with some way to knock off these corners and then start to kind of transition from here down all the way down to here and i think i'm going to do that with combination of chisels sandpaper maybe a hand plane although it's kind of curvy i don't really know let's figure it out [Applause] [Music] okay so i thought maybe the belt sander was the way to do this or it was going to be a whole lot of like knocking off the edges but this turbo plane which can be put on any angle grinder is awesome for this so this is amazing thank you you're welcome so the material held here and held there but it i didn't do this right but i was rewarded by it not being ruined so i'm going to take some sandpaper to this and i'm going to smooth it out but the truss rod just came in let's see if it actually fits so this is the rod that you would put an allen key in here and you would turn it and the top one would tighten and it would force this to bow opposite the string tension so this theoretically is supposed to fit down in here maybe it's supposed to be tight yeah it totally fits in there this is awesome i'm absolutely loving how the got him whoopsies i'm absolutely loving how the contour is turning out and i still have some more work to do but it's uh a lot easier to do with the sander once you get the turbo plane to actually get the nice curve now one of the cool things about having this key on here is as i'm thinking of other things that i need to do i can make new templates to drop on in fact i realized that i didn't have a way to have the sound holes cut in here and accurately placed so i went over my drawing in illustrator created those and made a template and they dropped right on here so i'm going to trace these out since this is a contoured surface and then go to the what's that saw called cutting one the cutie saw the little tiny scroll saw then i'm going to go to the scroll saw and cut them out [Music] i got the neck all sanded it did not take a lot of work because of sorry it's not sorry so the smoothing pass really helped but a little bit of sandpaper went a long way this is 80 grit and it feels pretty amazing to play but this is pretty awesome i was super scared to do this and look it's like it's right here bob you have a neck i have a neck i have a neck but the holes are not all the way through because i'm not sure what size tuning machines i'm going to get i think they're 3 8 so i just made little marky marks so that i can drill through them with a drilling drill make some holley holes i realized that cutting those holes would actually be a lot easier if there's less material and since i'm going to be hollowing out some of the inside of the surface anyway i'm going to go ahead and do that now and it should make it a little bit easier to use on the scroll saw [Music] [Music] what is that because i selected this pocket and i bet i didn't change it from outside of the lines to inside of the lines [Music] the front of my guitar is done to a point uh obviously there's a ton more sanding to do i've got to drill all these holes here and the big thing is i have to cut the pocket for the neck to go in but i want to do that until i've actually got the entire body together so now that i've got the back part kind of rough cut out i want to join this and the back section temporarily so that i can cut the profile to match this all the way around get the two pieces matched up and i've got a cool idea of how to do that so that i can take them apart and put them back together before i do the final glue up this is probably not absolutely necessary but i want to join these with dowels so i'm going to drill a hole like right there and then maybe two down here then i'm gonna use my dowel centers to transfer those holes onto the back of this piece onto the inside and then drill matching holes that way i can put a dowel in here and it will give me some keys to be able to lock these two pieces together just so as i continue to work on them i don't have to glue up before i'm ready [Music] check it out this bit is for milling uh pcbs like processing boards but it can also cut frets if you go slow enough how many did you break three it's a magic number [Applause] we both kind of ran to some issues my issue is that i was super happy with this thing it was going great and i got in a hurry and i put this template on backwards so even though these sound holes are supposed to be offset i made them offset in the wrong direction so this one should be up here this one should be down there and even though it won't actually affect anything i just didn't want to look at this guitar for the rest of my life and be disappointed so i started over which is on you that's super unfortunate because you were doing a killer job i'm really happy with it other than that yeah other than it's well wrong it is well wrong well mine is well wrong too so this is the overall shape the scallops are there the shape is there but when i went to cut the neck pocket mine was a little tiny air that i didn't click a radial button and it carved a much larger neck pocket so this neck pocket is wrong so instead of just thickening up the neck i went ahead and made an entirely new blank yeah so i'm going to cut this on the cnc and pretty much start over and this is my other guitar face i guess looks pretty much identical except for these holes are in the right place and i realized after i got all this work done that this section of wood was a lot lighter than the other ones so unfortunately it's not going to match across as well as the other one did but you know whatever it's still going to look nice i also was able to experiment on the busted one with making the neck pocket which is a good thing because i found that the neck pocket is actually slightly the wrong shape so i was able to figure that out on the one that i wasn't going to use anyway so that when i cut this one it will fit perfectly for the stratneck that i bought so we're good to go and i'm ready to put this on the other part of the body one thing i really like about our mess-ups is that we were able to continue to learn like you checked the neck pocket i checked the electronics pocket so this is where all the electronics are gonna go i have a separate 3d printed cup that i have attached all the potentiometers and the preamp and all this stuff i can go ahead and wire up in the pocket and then just drop the pocket in place this is where the nine volt batteries are going to go so i checked to make sure that my dimensions that everything else is right and it is but the whole thing is wrong i did want to point out one more time neither one of us make guitars we don't necessarily know what we're doing but we're learning about this and so we're not trying to tell you exactly the right way to do it we're showing the process of us learning how to do these two different things and i think it now we're at a good point where we can move on and start getting them ready to glue up and turn into actual playable things yeah in this entire process of me making my own bass this is the fifth blank that i have made i know on camera so far i've made two other ones the second one was kind of janky wood so i didn't use it so i went ahead and got some nicer pieces of wood some nicer stripes and although i really like this and i really hope this is the one that's gonna work if this messes up that's okay go get some more wood and start over from a fresh clean slate yeah just wood that's it all right let's get back to it yeah oh geez oh geez it's so scary i'm kind of roughing out the area that needs to be solid down the middle and so i know what areas on the sides i can cut out for the semi hollow buddy [Music] what was our band name fret level midnight fret level midnight [Laughter] we could we could do the dance [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that's a cool shot on the side cool with the stripes are you getting that yeah i'm still recording all right the tape came loose all right lift it up no i i think it's okay actually um as long as you can get it back to where it was or i can just use a band saw and a flush trim that's fine it's fine that's fine [Music] dude that looks legit oh goodness gracious good job it's getting more nerve-wracking every time i touch it yep so the center line cool stripes that i made are off which is not terrible uh but the contour pass screwed up as you saw it's not terrible yeah but i'm gonna paint the top anyway because i'm going to paint it because i'm going to paint stuff i'm going to paint all that nice hardwood you'll ever see it [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so you salvaged the body yeah it was so it looked really good my ocd is being triggered because if this were all just one piece you would not notice that right but because i put cool stripes now the stripes drop center but the neck fits into the neck pocket all of the pockets are where they're supposed to be i still have to do some final kind of finish sanding but this is ready to go awesome i've got my the whole cut in the back of mine for the electronic spill to access i still have a lot of sanding to do but i'm not going to finish all that until i get these two pieces put together which i can't do until i get all of the pockets for the pickups and all that type of stuff i have a lot left to do but i think this is a pretty good place to stop this particular video because this thing would get really really long so let us know your thoughts about our guitars and our process so far again knowing that we are not professionals we're trying to figure this out if you've got some other guitar resources that you think may help us or other people leave them down in the comments we can all learn together we've got tons of other types of projects that you may want to check out and we'll be back next week to finish up these builds that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you next time where i showed you how to use the jointer the planer and the table saw to do it no thing we've got lots of other videos that you may want to check out bye see ya i forgot what the thing is

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 137,015

Rating: 4.9490113 out of 5

Keywords: i like to make stuff, iliketomakestuff, diy, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, 3D printing, prop making, guitar, guitar kit, guitar kit build, diy guitar, diy guitar build, guitar build, build off, single board build off, luthier, fender, ibanez, semi hollow body guitar, bass guitar, best bass guitar, best electric guitar, fender starcaster, 5 string bass, stew mac, bass kit, guitar body, cnc, cnc guitar body, cnc guitar neck, cnc bass neck, i like to make stuff guitar

Id: iBXphiRbSjY

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021