The Mistakes I Made On My First Guitar Build

after almost 20 years of building guitars i'm not making as many mistakes as i used to but when i made my first guitar which is this guitar right here i made a couple of mistakes so stick with me and i'm going to show you what those mistakes were and how i overcame them [Music] [Applause] hey guys it's chris at highline guitars welcome back to another one of my guitar building videos the last video that i posted i had shown very briefly this guitar that i built about 20 years ago this is actually the very first guitar i ever made and i made it for my son it was kind of one of those father-son challenge projects at any rate after i posted that video a viewer commented and asked if i could do a video where i would talk about some of the mistakes that i made building this first guitar now as i said it was 20 years ago so i'll do my best to try to remember everything that went wrong and how i dealt with those issues okay well first things first the neck was actually one of those pre-made stratocaster style paddle headstock necks that i purchased off at ebay it's probably shipped from china and if i remember correctly i paid 35 dollars free shipping and surprisingly enough the neck was in pretty good shape it it was well made neck and the only thing that i've noticed is i do have some fret sprout and if i remember correctly it's always been the case this isn't something that happened over time because of the shrinkage of the wood uh the only real complaint that i had with it is it came the net it came with is plastic so the first thing i would do is or should have done was replace the nut with the bone nut and cut the slots myself however being that this was my first guitar build i didn't have the tools to cut the slots in bone to make my own nut so that's something a skill that i developed later because i didn't really want to equip any of the guitars that i built with plastic nuts otherwise the neck worked pretty well the body is made from alder three pieces that i glued together and after 20 years i can not only see but i can feel the seams so i prefer these days if i'm going to make a neck or make a body i'll make it either out of two pieces or i'll try to source a wide enough piece so that i can just keep it one piece of wood instead of multiple pieces now when i cut this body out instead of making a template and then cutting it out with a band saw and then routing it with a top bearing pattern bit what i did was i freehand sketched out the shape of the body that i wanted using the neck to kind of form the heel area and the neck pocket area and then i cut it out using just a handheld power jigsaw now the problem with doing that is the blade on a jigsaw is only supported at one end and it might have a little bit of a structure that keeps or attempts to keep the blade straight but the other end of the blade where it cuts through the wood is not supported so as you're cutting these kind of contour shapes the blade will bend and when it bends you're either cutting way outside of the shape that you're trying to achieve or you're cutting inside and that happened in both ways with this body so after i cut it out i noticed that the sides rather than being straight up and down and perpendicular to the top they were at an angle either angling in or angling out so i had to go back in and do a lot of sanding and i think if if i remember correctly i used files to try to get the sides straight but it was an enormous task so what i ended up doing on future guitar builds is i got smart and i made a template of the body and i made that out of half inch thick mdf board so what i would do is i would i still had to use a jigsaw to cut the body shape out because i didn't have a band saw yet i just made sure that i cut at least a half an inch outside of the line or the template and then i took a handheld router with a top bearing pattern bit and i routed away that excess wood until the bearing came in contact with the template and i went all the way around the perimeter and that resulted in giving me sides that were perfectly straight up and down and you know that way it's so much faster and more accurate method of making a guitar body although these days instead of using mdf templates i'm using g-code templates for my cnc machine anyway i think that's probably the safest bet now one thing i would definitely recommend if you're going to be using a template and you're going to route up to that template is you need to be aware of the direction that your bit is spinning as well as the direction that you're going around the wood and the direction of the grain i'm not going to get into specifics about what you have to be aware of but if you go on to the internet and do a google search for guitar body router tear out and look at the images and you'll see how a lot of people have come up with diagrams showing the direction that you need to move your router to avoid tear out and that's especially true with certain types of wood like alder and poplar if you're routing in the wrong direction you can tear out great big chunks of wood and ruin the body so that's something to be aware of now the next issue that i ran into was routing the depth of my neck pocket and i really wasn't sure what depth to route it to so i figured since i'm using a fender stratocaster style guitar neck then i would have to route that pocket to the same depth as a stratocaster so i simply measure the depth of one of my own stratocasters including the thickness of the pickguard and that's how deep i made my pocket well as it turned out this neck isn't exactly the same size as a fender stratocaster style neck it's not a licensed neck so when i inserted the neck uh it ended up sitting too deep into the body and i didn't realize that until after i strung up the guitar and i couldn't get the action where i wanted it to be so what i ended up having to do was to shim the neck i also noticed at the same time when i strung up the guitar that the strings were not centered over the fretboard they were off slightly and that's because i didn't align the neck with the center line of the body or more accurately the position of my pickups or the bridge i needed all that to be aligned up properly with the neck so that the strings would fall over the very you know would be centered over the fretboard i'd have an equal distance between the edge of the string and the edge of the fretboard on both sides what i ended up having to do was i had to remove the neck and then i plugged the holes for three of the screws i left this one intact then what i did was i pressed the neck back down into the body and i installed this screw then what i did is i took a length of thread from the nut back to the bridge and i checked where that thread was in relation to the edge of the fretboard and i did that on both sides and i could see that the neck was off so i placed a clamp on the neck and i kept the clamp loose and then what i did was is i grabbed a hold of the body grabbed the neck up at the nut and i pushed it toward the base side so i was angling the neck ever so slightly and i would do that and tighten the clamp and then check with the thread until i had the strings centered properly over the fretboard with an equal amount of distance all the way along the neck on both the base and treble side once i was satisfied that i had the neck straight and aligned properly i could then insert my three screws and then let the points of those screws put a divot into the back of the heel and then i removed the neck drilled my pilot holes reinstalled the neck and screwed it down and everything was okay i should have done that before the first time i installed the neck it would have saved me quite a bit of trouble but that's what happens you know and one of the things that you learn as you're building a guitar that everything has an impact on everything else and alignment is so important and so critical now the next mistake i made had to do with drilling the string through ferrules i really didn't know how to do this so i just kind of freehanded it and it came out okay i mean it's fairly straight they're a little bit close together and this particular ferrule here is a little bit too far forward and what i've learned to do since making this guitar is i use a pin alignment system with my drill press and i've talked about that in other videos but basically in a nutshell i'll place the bridge on the body where it's going to be mounted i'll remove the saddles and then i'll screw it into position and then i'll drill holes through the string through holes in the bridge base plate then i'll remove the base plate take it out to my drill press with the pin alignment system and it's it's just a pin on the on the base that is aligned up with the center of the bit and then i'll place the body upside down so that the pin is going into the holes and i'll drill each of the holes in the back and typically i'll drill two holes for each because i like to recess my string through ferrule so i'll start by drilling a 5 16 inch hole about a sixteenth of an inch deep for all of these then i'll switch out to a quarter inch bit and drill the remaining portion of the hole until it meets up with the hole that i drilled from the top that allows me to recess the ferals and make sure that they are in a perfect straight line so those are basically the mistakes that i made on this first build and oddly enough they weren't that major and i was able to overcome them and make a few adjustments in order for the guitar to play properly but when it was done i was so happy and pleased with the results and my son loved the guitar that i decided okay i need to build another guitar and i need to learn from those mistakes and try to make a perfect guitar and i think that's what causes a lot of folks to get addicted to guitar building is after that first guitar build they want to fix the mistakes they made and hopefully the next guitar will be perfect and then from then on every guitar you would make would be perfect well the guitar i made after this one i actually made my own neck and made the nut did all the stuff well i ended up introducing some new uh errors and mistakes which i had to learn from and so that kind of encouraged me to try a third guitar and then a fourth guitar and then a fifth guitar and it was probably around the seventh or eighth guitar that i was really starting to get the confidence to build a good guitar from start to finish without any major issues of course as you're building guitars every time you'll build a guitar you start to experiment with new ideas new kinds of inlays new kinds of woods different shapes carved tops all these different possibilities and every new possibility is going to introduce the potential for new problems however as you get experience building guitars you're able to start anticipating what those problems are going to be beforehand and you learn better how to research and learn how to do things you know when i first started building this guitar the resources were pretty limited it's not like it is today okay well i hope you found this video to be enlightening i certainly don't want it to dissuade you from building a guitar building guitars is a lot of fun and it is challenging when i built this guitar 20 years ago i really had no expectations and once i was finished and had made some of the corrections i just mentioned i had a guitar that played pretty well and my son was happy so uh it really wasn't until i started building more guitars and became maybe a little bit overconfident in my skills and started trying to do things that i wasn't necessarily ready to do that i started getting into a little bit of trouble nevertheless i was able to overcome because i i was so committed to building guitars and trying to build that perfect guitar that i just kept sticking with it and at something i definitely would recommend to anybody who is just maybe toying with the idea of building their own guitar at any rate i hope you liked the video and as always click the like button comment subscribe all that good stuff you know if you want to show this channel support as i always say head over to guitarplans.com and purchase a plan for a guitar that you can build yourself like i did here and or you can buy a plan for one of the different kinds of tools that i've made over the years to help solve some of the problems with building guitars including a cnc machine and you know even if you don't make the plan just know that your purchase is helping to support the youtube channel and if you would like to support the channel but don't want to buy a plan you can always buy one of the highline guitar t-shirts that i sell i've got a merch shelf down below and if you can't see that merch shelf i have a link to my shop in the description below so as always in the meantime take care stay safe and i'll see you soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Highline Guitars

Views: 33,022

Keywords: common guitar building mistakes, avoiding guitar building mistakes, how to make a guitar, routing a guitar body

Id: s8dgtJGhAps

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022