Here's a nicely-done article about building a solidbody electric guitar from plywood. Total build: body, neck, fingerboard, everything. I'd call this a "found-material project", related to cigar box instruments, but I think his neck construction method can be lifted and applied to any other body -- cigar boxes, gas cans, cookie tins, wine boxes, etc. etc. The plywood technique would make a warp-resistant neck even without a truss rod.
Plywood Guitar Construction How-To
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Hi, yes it can be a bit of a chore, but very rewarding when a nice slick neat fingerboard is achieved. But if one dose not follow the correct steps you ca end chasing your tail to get things right.
Taff
Hi. Wow, this is an old post resurrected. I reckon old posts are better than no posts at all. I have not read it all word for word, but a few things came to mind. One showed how the forum was used years ago, and the other showed the names of long-lost contributors that kept the forum buzzing.
Anyway, This last post slipped by me. Hi Michael, It would be done the same way, I imagine, as is usually done when fretting or refretting a bound fingerboard. The whole fret is cut to the length of the slot and finished off and that's it.
Or the frets are cut to the full width of the fingerboard, and the tang is cut back under the fret crown at each end to fit the slot. So you have a fret as long as the fingerboard is wide, and a fret tang that is as long as, or just under, the length of the slot. Tap or press in and finish in the normal way.
Cheers Taff
Thanks Taffy, seems too fiddly for me. Fretting is my least favourite part of building CBGs.
How do you insert the frets if you don't cut the slot across the whole fretboard?
Brian May from Queen. His guitars are plywood. Good plywood is supposed to be stronger than wood. Still not the best choice for a fret board. Be interested to see how long the frets stay in.
With science proving that todays well made pickups can sound as good in wood or toilet paper it no longer matters what the body is made out of.
I have to disagree on the body not mattering issue. Pickups don't just pickup the string vibration, they also pickup the body and neck vibrations. Plug in your guitar, mute the strings and knock on the body and neck. You'll hear the vibrations going through to the amp. Every part of a guitar has a signature on it's sound.
Good pickups can make a crappy guitar sound good, but they will make a great guitar sound awesome.
Oily has spoken often about his regard for plywood necks,just a little bit of thought would see that the laminations in different directions.are most likely to be very effective,as opposed to a single linear grain,i've not done it myself,but i'm pretty happy it would be the real deal
But that isn't the point. The point is to build a playable musical instrument out of cheap crappy scrap I have to hand. The fact that they sound as good as they do is what keeps me coming back for more. I'm building two 4-stringers for a friend, and came into some decent marine plywood that has far fewer voids than the cheap Chinese or Indonesian ply I usually use. The only better ply I would use, if I could and it were locally available, would be voidless Baltic birch plywood, which is typically used for high end amp cabinets, speaker cabinets, and even acoustic guitars (Harmony / Kay / Stella acoustic guitar bodies and soundboards were famously made from Baltic birch plywood).
Have you used marine ply before? Expensive stuff, but no voids. I'm guessing that you glue the necks in place or use neck thru construction? I wouldn't want to try bolting one in place with the lamination's running up and down.
I mount the neck as a "neck to," with the neck tailpiece butting up against the inside of the box at the tail end, with the laminate facing up. I do also relieve the neck inside the box about 1/8" to let the soundboard vibrate, except at the ends inside the box. With my own boxes, because they are 3 to 3-3/4" deep, I also mounted the neck with two plywood posts, one at either end, with about a 2-3 degree neck back angle. I also let the neck sit about 1/4" above the box top, and cut a scarf jointed, glued and screwed headstock.
With a neck to arrangement like this, I also do my string through the body, drilling holes from the back, through the neck, just like a Strat. This seems to improve sustain, and gives me a great string break angle at the bridge / saddle.
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