Bamboo Guitar (Part 2)

The guitar project was on hold for the past week, but today I finally had a chance to get a little more work done. First, we mounted the routing templates on the rough-cut bodies and cleaned up the outlines. The big pin router made short work of the first body, but halfway through the second one the bit started to chatter and tore a huge chunk out of the side. I was worried, but after gluing it back on and re-routing the body (with a new bit) I can’t even find the damaged spot. Somehow I didn’t get any pictures of the bodies in this state. Next, we drilled out the pickup cavities and neck pockets before cleaning them up on the router as well.

With the bodies basically done, we moved on to necks. Last week we’d ripped some pieces of the horizontally laminated board and glued them together to make the bamboo strips vertical, which I think looks better. Today we cut out the necks on the band saw, then ran them through the pressure planer until they came out at 21mm. The fingerboards will be the same 5mm thick bamboo board I used for the tops and backs of the bodies.

We didn’t have time to finish routing the necks today, so I had to use a spare maple/rosewood neck to test out the body. Starting to look like a guitar…