The Sanding and the Drilling

It's been a long time since I've posted, and I apologize. The next step would be drilling some pilot holes for mounting some components, but I needed some tools before I could start with this step. Namely, I had a really lucky opportunity on purchasing a drill (you know, the thing I need to actually drill the holes) on Amazon. I happened to spot a daily deal that was selling a DeWalt drill that was normally $400 for $150. That was a lucky break. Additionally, I was also waiting on some clamps from a coworker, that I would use to hold the guitar body during drilling and to hold the neck to the body. Everything came together this past Friday when the drill arrived and my coworker brought his clamps to me. On the early hours of Saturday (10 a.m. during the weekend is pretty early for me), I set about continuing my project.

Notice the two shirts that I laid out underneath to protect
the guitar from the hard surface. Their sacrifice will not
be forgotten.

The first set of holes I needed to drill were the holes for the neck. This is arguably one of the most important pieces of the guitar, and its placement is paramount. The total length of a guitar string from the bridge, the part of the guitar where the strings come from, to the stop point at the neck, where the strings stop vibrating, must be a near exact 25.5 inches. There is actually a surprising amount of math that comes from this, but I'll spare you the details and explain - no that would take too long - sum it up by saying that the guitar sounds its best when the vibrating portion of the string is at that length. Obviously, the position of the neck affects this distance, so I had to be as exact as possible. This is also why I waited so long for my coworker's clamps. The clamps were vital in holding the neck in the correct position.

The importance of the neck's position impacts the position of other items as well: the bridge and the pick-guard. The bridge is a metal device on the guitar that can be used to alter the overall length of individual strings on the guitar, for intonation purposes. So in case I ended up messing up the position of the neck, I still have some leeway, though not much. The pick-guard rests in between the bridge and the neck, and covers the cavities that house the guitar's electronics. So, the final position of all these items were dependent on each other, and it required a lot of adjustments before everything was positioned properly. After everything was placed, I marked the hole locations and drilled my pilot holes. Overall, I seemed to spend about 40 minutes positioning everything, and about 2.3 minutes actually drilling.

It almost looks sad...

Some other things that required drilling were the strap mounts, the spring mount, and the output jack panel. A small side-note on the output jack, the cavity that BYOGuitar drilled for it turned out to be too small. As a quick fix, I sanded down the edges of the cavity so that it would fit, but made sure that it still wouldn't show after being mounted.

The last few steps before painting are:

1. Sand it.
2. Sand it some more
3. ?????
4. Sand it one last time.
5. ...then sand it again.

So after following steps 1 through 4, I set the body aside and turned my focus to the neck. Specifically, I had to mount the tuning pegs. Thankfully, the holes for the tuning pegs were pre-drilled, so all I had to do was screw the nuts to the tuning pegs, rotate them into position, and then fix them into position with a tiny screw. For the most part, nothing eventful happened, except that one of the screws stripped while I was screwing it in, so it's currently sticking about 1/16 of an inch. Unfortunately, not much I can do about it now. D'oh! Either way, the next step is painting. Cue dramatic music.

Thanks for reading!