And Work Begins.

Here's the wood for the guitar body. I'm using Alder which is a common wood used to make electric guitar bodies. I like to use Alder because the tree is plentiful in North America.

The boards were a little long so I cut them down a bit. Because it can be difficult to find a single piece of wood wide enough for a guitar body, it's common to glue two pieces of wood together to create a single larger board. That's what we are going to do with these. 

If you are going to glue boards together it's very important that the edges are perfectly flat. If they are not flat the area where the two boards meet, which is called a "Joint," will be weak and might break someday. I have a special machine called a "Jointer" which makes board edges and sides flat. Above you can see the nice flat edges of the boards after they went through the jointer. When we glue these boards together the joint will be very strong. The last place this board will ever break will be along this joint.

 

The boards are ready to be glued together.

 

 

With the glue applied I clamp the boards together and leave overnight 

 

After the glue has dried and we have a strong joint, we want to make sure our board is perfectly flat. (This is very important when you are building things with wood). Here I'm using the router in something I built called a "router sled." I put the board in the router sled and adjust the bit so that it just barely touches the wood. After this I slide the router over the board taking a small amount of the wood off the top. You can see in the picture above the sawdust that is left after the router cuts the board. After passing the router over the entire board the top is perfectly flat. Once this is done, I flip the board over and do the same thing to the other side.

 
And now we have a strong, flat board that is wide enough to make a guitar body out of. Next the Design Team will trace the pattern of a Telecaster body on blank from a template I've made. This board is off to Room 10!