Routing fun.

I realize that I haven't blogged in a couple weeks, but that's because I haven't been doing a whole lot in the area of guitar building. I've been working diligently in archtop to try and get things done, and I'll be done with graduations soon. I'm still not sure if it's going to get finished by the end of the school year, but I sure as heck am going to try.

I made some great progress on the electric today, so I'm in a pretty good mood about that. I also spent most of the day on Wednesday working on the archtop and electric because we didn't have class due to a faculty in-service day, whatever that is. Remember how I was irritated that I drilled my fretboard position dots crooked and they looked really horrible? I did some brainstorming and decided that I was going to inlay diamonds over, so on Wednesday I cut some diamonds out of gold mother of pearl and just have to route the inlays into the fingerboard and epoxy them in.

First item of business this morning was to do a neck pocket test route. I had already made a neck pocket template, so it was now a matter of making sure it would work on the real thing. I did my test route as quickly as possible and it went nearly perfect, so I decided to do the real thing and had no problems.

Next Item of business was to drill the neck mounting holes through the body and into the neck. The holes through the body are bigger than the screws so they can slip right through. This allows you to pull the neck snugly into the neck pocket without the screws getting caught up in the holes in the body.

After measuring things a couple of times, I marked out the bridge location and drilled the holes for the bushing posts that the floating bridge sits up against. I then located where the tremolo block cavity would go and routed that, flipped the guitar around, and routed the spring cavity and remainder of the block cavity.

Here's the guitar body with the neck pocket routed, and bridge post holes drilled and tremelo block cavity routed:

And a shot with the neck and bridge in place also showing the diamonds that I cut out to cover up my drilling mistake. All thats left is frets, electronic routing, a little body carving and rounding, and a finish, which will be done the last 2 weeks in May:
This shows the rear spring cavity and block cavity routes with some wire channels showing through: