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Let’s get caught up with the work on the body! I’ll have to step back a bit in time, as I’ve been working on all sorts of parts of the guitar and neglecting to show all the body work. So let’s step back to the beginning…
Recall that the project is to replicate a vintage Danelectro, and the bodies on these are cheap masonite/pressboard glued to a cheap plywood core. the sides of the body then are the edge of the plywood. Cheap plywood edge is notoriously rough, so it would look terrible just sanded and painted. Danelectro’s solution was/is to avoid the time and labour needed to shape, fill and sand the sides, and instead just covered it with vinyl tape, like this:
It does have a funky retro vibe, but it’s also kinda tacky. And most importantly, I can’t seem to find the right kind of vinyl tape anywhere, at least for a reasonable price, so I’m going to clean up the sides of the body so they can be painted. This will also allow me to add binding to the body to match the neck…should look good and also make the edges of the body a little more durable than just painted pressboard.
What to use as filler then? Why not bondo? Why not indeed! “That’s for car repairs!” the car-repairing ones of you out there might exclaim. Fun fact: in the early days of electric guitar manufacturing, a ton of the tools and techniques came directly from the auto industry. If you think that some of the early guitar colours looked suspiciously like the auto shades of the day, you are not off base. Companies like Fender used auto paint extensively back then. Cheap, durable and the spray tools were easy to obtain. So bondo is completely in keeping with the retro vibe!
It’s been a while since I’ve done any car bodywork, and I forgot how noxious this stuff is! Luckily it was nice outside with a slight breeze, so I was able to finish up on the driveway without having to find my chemical respirator.
It was about at this stage that I did the bulk of the work on the neck, including routing out the neck pocket (see here for details), but as a refresher, this included routing out the pickup slots:
And also gluing up the pressboard panels:
Next, I need to cut out the pickup holes and access to where the electronics will end up going. I’ll cover it in another post, but the electronics will be mounted and wired to the pickguard, so some area under where the pickguard will go needs to be opened up. I draw that out, drill a couple of starter holes then use a hand held router to cut that out.
The pickup holes are a little trickier, and I unfortunately didn’t take many pics of that process. It entailed creating a router template for the exact size of hole I needed, then carefully clamping that into place on the guitar and routing out those channels. The hole is just barely bigger than the pickups themselves, and as the pickup mounting holes had already been drilled, everything needed to line up precisely. Happily, it did!
And after this I decided to go with an ‘f-hole’ on the guitar face as well – this gives the guitar a bit of acoustic characteristic as sound ‘gets back into’ the guitar body and interacts with the strings as you play. This also entailed creating a router template to get a precise and clean cut. F-holes are traditionally shaped like the letter ‘f’ (think about the cutouts on a violin, for example), but they don’t have to be. I went with a different shape that I think ties into the vibe of the guitar better:
Now that all the cuttin’ is done, it’s closer to paint time! I do want to add binding to the body, but I’ll get some primer on to stabilize the pressboard against bubbling up when the binding glue (acetone) is added. In keeping with our automotive theme, I’m using a sandable primer meant for car bodies.
A couple of coats later… Don’t worry; it gets better!
The binding channel is routed out the same way I did the channels in the neck way back here), and I do both the font and the back faces:
The binding has to bend around quite a bit, so to help it stay in place I pre-bend it. This means yet another jig! This is a simple one though; I duplicate the shape of the guitar on some cheap plywood, route a binding channel into it and tape in the binding around it. Along the way I use a heat gun to almost melt the binding then it cools holding the shape of the guitar. If the guitar body was some ‘normal’ wood rather than pressboard I would just do this on the real body, but I’m not so confident that the pressboard would handle the heat, so…
Two binding pieces are thus prebent, and I tape them into place on the actual body. Acetone is carefully dripped along the binding and this melts the plastic to the pressboard.
This goes swimmingly, and I tape off the binding to do another coat or two of primer.
Carefully primed, sanded and cleaned off, it’s finally time for the colour coat. Again keeping with the automotive theme, I’m using a metallic green. The first coat looks a little sketchy. In case you’re wondering what those four big holes are, they are where the pickup height adjustment screws go.
I empty the entire can on the guitar over the course of a day though, and the results are great!
I pull the tape off of the binding, and painstakingly use a razor blade to scrape the paint from the binding wherever it remained. I’m particularly happy with the sides – the bondo treatment worked great, and with the binding along the sides it looks like a ribbon around the body.
So the body is almost done! I’ll have to restart another project before finishing this one though – to protect the paint on this one, I have a can of some crazy good chemical clearcoat, I think it’s some kind of epoxy or similar. Once you pop the can though, you have to use it in a day or so or it goes bad. I have an older (Telecaster) body I’ve been working on and I want to use the clearcoat on that one too, so I now have to get that body sanded and stained. Hopefully that’ll only take a week or so, which will give the paint on this guitar ample time to cure before clearcoating!
Still a bit of scraping to finish off, but no rush there…
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