www.coleywood.com

The Guitar Project

Maryville, Tennessee

Here are some photos from the guitar project that my grandson, Gavin Coley, and I have recently completed.

The origin of the design is the Red Special as designed and built by Brian May of Queen however, it incorporates some parameters from my grandson's Les Paul.

Raw material ....

Shown here is the raw material for the neck, the body and the accomplished musician.

The neck ....

We started with the neck, made of Philippine mahogany, which was routed to receive the trussrod and has the head angle cut at 10 degrees.

Here we have layed out the various neck parts to check for fit and to scribe a line along the edges of the fingerboard which was earlier cut to size. The fingerboard has 22 frets and the neck will join the body at the 16th fret. Shown is the Floyd Rose locking nut chosen by Gavin, as were all of the hardware items.

This shows Gavin after having glued the fingerboard to the neck blank.

Here is Gavin at the scroll saw cutting out templates that will be used to aid in carving the neck to shape.

This shows the neck clamped to a fixture used to hold it during the carving process.

Here the neck is clamped to a 1.5 degree bevel jig to saw the angle for the neck to body joint.

Here I am using the same jig to hold the neck for drilling the side dot holes.

The Body ....

The shape of the body was drawn in AutoCAD and a pattern was then plotted to use to cut out a template. That template was used to rough saw the body out of African mohogany and then used to pattern-route it to shape. Here, the template is being sanded smooth.

The body template is attached to a mahogany blank which is then rough cut on the band saw.

The body and top, after having been pattern-routed, receive some cleanup work.

A template is used to guide the plunge router to cut out the acoustic cavities and the mortise to receive the neck.

Begining to assemble the pieces ....

Testing the fit of the neck and refining the joint.

Here the body and neck have been routed to provide clearance for three Trisonic pickups.

The top has been routed to provide openings for the electronics and the neck. It is shown here being passed through the drum sander to reduce it to the final thinkness of 0.156".

The bottom, top and neck as they are being refined to fit together.

Here, the bottom and top are glued and clamped together.

This shows the various templates used to route the cavities for the Floyd Rose tremelo bridge.

This view shows the bottom side routing for the tremelo spring cavity.

Here is the body at the router table showing a jig used to cut a rabbet for the binding.

The top and bottom bindings have been glued into place and held with masking tape and a couple of spring clamps until dry.

This shows the body clamped to a fixture for drilling the hole for the amplifier jack.

The pick guard ....

Here a template, made in the same fashion as the body templates,is layed out on a sheet of 0.090" black-white-black laminated plastic.

This shows the shaped pick guard, with all holes cut or drilled, being tested for proper fit to the body.

The back side of the pick guard has been covered with copper foil to shield the circuitry to prevent hum. Also shown here are the pickups, the switches and the volume and tone controls.