I built my first guitar 20 years ago. This video will explain the mistakes I made and how I overcame them. Show your support! Visit www.eguitarplans.com/ and buy a plan. Or visit highline-custom-guitars-2.cre... and buy a shirt!
I just went through a very similar experience - only I was rebuilding a Harmony H78 (much like a Gibson 335), from about 1964. It's actually a nice guitar with three De Armond pickups and a Bigsby vibrato. This was my first time doing ANYTHING with an instrument. I started off with a disassembled wreck that needed repair, repaint (I now HATE lacquer...), rewiring, a new fret board etc, etc. It's now done, and it plays well, and it looks pretty good. I experienced exactly what you described with the neck alignment, and I also had to do several of the other operations two or three times to get them right. I feel like I have completed a college course, but I still have a lot to learn, and a long way to go! I now want to bring another one back to life, so it is a bit addictive... Thanks for sharing your work.
I've made my first guitar ten years ago, from a guitar kit, making a plenty of mistakes too; and I am still looking for the perfect build, building more and more guitars. I like to think I am a perfectionist, but I know I'm just an addict!
My biggest mistake on my first build was not having proper tools for fret work or quality files for my nut. The guitar turned out pretty good, but it took many hours longer than it should have.
As already mentioned, invaluable information. I do my own mods and stuff on most of my basses and looking forward to doing my own first actual bass build. Thanks so much.
Thank you for sharing your first guitar build experience. I have very good woodworking skills but the technical aspect of a guitar build has been daunting in my mind. This video shows me that I just need to dive in and make my mistakes.
This is really great content for future builders! 👍 Watching pros doing things correctly doesn't teach you the troubles everyone encounters when starting out. I had a lot of the same problems... Still do 😜 But fixing the small issues is part of the fun!
My first build was started in 1987 and not finished until 1993! Built entirely with hand tools , except for an electric drill. The body and neck were cut from cherry and the top was carved maple. I cut out the body with a coping saw, and I ran into some of the same problems you did with the narrow, flexible blade tilting, requiring a lot of work with a rasp and sandpaper to get the sides perpendicular to the top. Cherry is about as hard as maple. Carving the top was really hard too, and many times I got discouraged and set the project aside for months at a time. The neck was set into the body, and I got the neck angle right just by sheer luck. But I didn't cut the holes for the pickups or drill for the bridge and tailpiece until after the neck was glued in, so there were no problems with aligning the strings over the neck. All in all, the guitar turned out pretty well, and I am still proud to show it to others. Compared to that guitar, my second one was an attempt to build a neck-through design, and that gave me nothing but trouble at every stage. Thanks for your channel and your honest take on the pitfalls and rewards of building your own instrument. And thank you for replying to my comment about filling pores in wood!
The first cigar box guitar I ever made was for my son too. The next 4 of them were also for him. I've now build around 18 CBG's. As you pointed out, the ongoing quest for the next build to be better than the last does get to be a bit of an obsession.
I built my first guitar when I started college in 1966 and was in a band. I had a Fender Mustang, but wanted a custom body. So I built a semi-hollow, Mosrite shaped body (German carved) with a f hole and moved the Mustang parts onto it. It looked great and played well. I used it for a year, then a local music store saw it and offered me a new Verntura hollow body jazz guitar in trade (I think it was a "lawsuit" guitar), but It was just what I wanted, as I was now playing some jazz.
I think it's good for people to understand that even people who are good at something now...made mistakes in the beginning. I think there are things about our culture and the way people sometimes talk about things, or maybe even the way things are portrayed in media that can leave people with the impression that people who are good at things are just...good at them, and always were. That's basically total nonsense. I'm 40 and I wish I had learned that much sooner in life. Also, I really like what you did with the body on that guitar. Those little carve outs in the middle are very cool looking.
Excellent advice as always! I've been building guitars for over 30 years and if I had one piece of advice for beginners it would be to plan out very carefully the order of operations. A cut that would be easy and precise when the blank is square becomes a huge challenge if you get ahead of yourself. Be patient and think several steps ahead. Have fun, enjoy the process and the feeling of pride!
Great looking guitar. Totally cool that you were able to have that experience with your son. That color, and shape, reminded me of something I built in woodshop, back in junior high school. It brought back that feeling, first time learning how to use the jigsaw, and everything else. Great video! Thank you! 🇺🇸🤘🏻🎸
I think it is a great subject for a video. I stumbled on a guitar making video by accident and was a player for years. So I started checking out different RU-vid channels on the subject and found the telecaster would be the easiest to start with ,so I built a tele. It was challenging and took about a year in to complete due to working job and family life . I love it much I'm building a Les Paul style now. Great video too.
Brings back memories of the oopsies and such that I've learned from in my builds. Not quite ready to build a neck, but just recently used a blank on a custom bass that needed a unique headstock design. Rough cut the bodies on a bandsaw, then use an oscillating drum/belt sander to finalize the shape. Everything is interconnected...placement of this will affect that, and so on. Building custom cases is similar...a progression of steps to get the best end result. Thank you for sharing this! 👍😎👍
Great video! I'm currently so much into guitars. I started with customizing my guitars, now i'm building one from premade neck and body, next one i'll do from scratch. And i have all the same thoughts as you have! And i've 3yo son, so i want to teach him all of this stuff!
Nice one Chris, all guitar builders make mistakes, especially at the beginning and in the early days of learning. Overcoming and learning from these mistakes is all part of the growing process and getting better. I loved the way you shared your experiences and the back to basics approach. Thanks!
I had a very similar experience, also about 20 years ago. Being a left handed player, I've taken right hand guitars and made new bodies. My first guitar had a Warmoth neck, but the bridge was too high so I had to angle the neck back. My second guitar I made on a milling machine so everything lined up, but, my string through holes didn't line up because the grain deflected the drill! So the line up on one side perfectly, just not the back. I've also gotten better at adding side marker dots too after totally screwing up the first neck.
Looks pretty similar to the first guitar I built minus the flames. I made lots of mistakes but nothing I couldn't recover from. It's still one of my favorite guitars to play.
Great video!!! I´m in the middle of my first build so this was great to see! I bet i´ll make some your misstakes, but now i´ll al test have a chance to avoid them! 🤣 Thank you!
Everything you talk about Chris i did exactly the same mistakes two years ago with my first build my Strat 😂😂 Now on my second build a Tele with Humbuckers and a Spalt Maple cap is perfect in every way I learned from my first one , plus i now have more tools and knowledge and it has become my retirement hobby great video's dude 😁😁🤘🤘🤘🤘
Wow impressively few mistakes. I am making way more lol as I seek to finish my first. Thanks for the great video. Can you expand or show more about the drill press pin alignment system you mentioned? One of the issues I had was tuner holes alignment since top is 10mm while bottom is 3/8”. I started with a much smaller diameter bit as a pilot but later realized it traveled a bit due to flex. This the two holes did not end up perfectly aligned and or perpendicular to the face.
This is really good stuff Chris. ai’m building my first guitar from a kit. Have done the sanding of the body and tung oil now and something I realise is the neck isn’t properly aligned in the neck pocket. I've not bolted the neck on yet (strat style guitar) to see how bad it is but visually I can see it)s slightly off. Might have to take a bit of the pocket away with a chisel to get it to align. Not sure what the proper procedure is so any thoughts from anyone is helpful. Will put bridge and neck on before any alignment assessment is done. Will put a couple of strings on just to see what the angle mis alignment is.
Hey Chris, Would you mind making a video about which CNC bits we need to making the guitars and what their purpose is? If I understand correctly you use CNC for nearly the whole build. Thank you!
For a while, I've wondered if it's better to have the string ferrules in a straight line or if they should be staggered like the saddles are. A staggered arrangement would create a consistent break angle for all the strings, and should improve tuning stability in general. I think it would be particularly beneficial on Tremolo bridges, where the low E and the G strings have the sharpest break angle and typically the worst tuning stability.
For neck pocket depth I had the exact opposite problem, the fretboard on my non licensed neck was too think, so it sat too shallow. In the future I'm just not going to cheap out on the neck and get a warmoth or something similar quality, though imo fender is too expensive for a custom guitar and you want your own logo on it or no logo probably.
Is building guitars your main gig? Just curious. I have yet to finish one because I keep making mistakes and having to start over. I actually don't even feel discouraged when it happens, but kind of eager to get it right the next time. I hope that is a good sign.
Could you explain how your CNC set-up gets around the problem of router tear-out? Do you tell the machine (via G-code) what direction the grain lies? What about when you use woods that have non-linear grain patterns, such as a burl top?
For most of my perimeter cuts, I start with a down cut bit for the first 1/4" depth. The I switch to an upcut bit for the rest of the depth. I've never had tear out with a counter clockwise climb cut.
Hello!!! Your videos have inspired me to start making my own guitars from scratch. I was wondering if you know of anyone that is able to make guitar blueprints that I can download to my computer to use my xtool to cut bodies with?
My first (and so far only) self-built guitar has a tremolo bridge because I didn't realize how stressful it would be to actually do it. Drilling holes for posts and the whole cavity was indeed quite scary. But it turned out okay. Not perfect, but that's okay as long as it can be set up properly. The second one will have a tune-o-matic. My takeaways, YMMV: - know how the neck is going to be positioned before doing anything permanent, preferably work on bridge placement after almost everything else (building from a kit might make it easier, but I wouldn't trust everything to fit perfectly anyway), - it's much more feasible afterwards to adjust the bridge up rather than down into wood; set the neck angle so that fully sunk bridge posts give a string action that is a little lower than intended (plus take into account that the neck will arch a little under string tension), - put pieces of cotton string between the bridge saddles and nut slots in place of edge strings to help find the best centering, - measure and test-fit everything (post distance, nut distance, centering) at least two times before you bite into wood, and maybe once again just after starting drilling to avoid possible issues with drill drift if your machining setup isn't great (like mine haha), - ensure that your drill is vertical relative to guitar body (I've slightly messed this one up due to semi-handheld setup, but two-point tremolo is certainly more forgiving in this regard). Also remember that tune-o-matics are normally slanted to improve the intonation range towards bass strings (especially important if you intend to downtune). Have a successful build :)
I'm on my first guitar kit build and I botched the stain. What do sanding grit do you recommend to remove the stain and hopefully protect a veneer top?
