My First Original Design, the Earl of Alden
For my first guitar, I wanted to make a visual statement, so of course cosmetics were very important. Hardware selection was among the first design considerations I made. I quickly selected’gold-foil’ pickups, with a silver foil option (1:20 in the video) for their unique appearance and beautiful tones.
Monday, Jan. 13 2020
Started work on the Neck. I finally found the router bit needed to cut the truss-rod channel. (It had been misplaced.) Busy afternoon…
Hardware selections: Hipshot Bridge
Mojotone Gold-Foil Pickups
showing the truss rod access…
Coming Together…
Using the Safe-T-Planer to plane and smooth the headstock.
Looks good; perfect thickness.
An ideal glue joint.
Starting the dot inlays.
A nice fit.
Ready for filing and leveling.
First day of shaping the back of the neck; working on the headstock and volute.
On the ‘Fender-style’ neck (see other Project), I did this entirely by hand. This time through, I started with my angle grinder and spindle sander. Saved HOURS of work to get to this point!
Working on the neck and heel.
Took a couple weeks off to work on some other stuff… I’m back.
Drilling holes and test-fitting the tuners…
Grover auto-locking tuners, lookin’ all shiny and such…
The last thing I did on a wonderful three-day weekend (thanks, Miles) was fret this puppy.
On the Strat neck, I hammered in the frets. This time, I used a fret-press caul to turn my drill press into a fret press. It worked beautifully!
Before fretting, I sanded the pau ferro fretboard with 220- and 320-grit paper. It looks amazing. Almost like glass. Guess I need a photo of that!
Test-fitting hardware. I made walnut knobs based on my Inkscape renderings. I think they came out great!
It was time to cut my first neck pocket. Had to be right the first time. No errors allowed.
Came out pretty darn nice.
More details…
First coats of cherry red.
And a drum roll, please…
This is a cherry-into-dark cherry burst, covered with several coats of (unpolished) clear-coat.
By the end, I was getting a lot more comfortable with my spray equipment, and the last few coats went on fast and thick.
These photos don’t do justice to the colors; I need to get into the sun!
In a week, I’ll be able to wet-sand and buff/polish to what I hope will be a high gloss. The ‘Tele’ was finished in nitrocellulose and is very glossy; this is my first finish with water-born lacquer.
So…. When I got to wet-sanding and buffing, I encountered a fatal flaw in the finish. The residue from the lacquer filled any pore cavity that remained at this point, and seemed to instantly solidify into a little white speck. So the beautiful, glossy finish was splattered with little white spots.
After agonizing and trying to repair it for about a week, I realized that the only solution was to strip the body to the bare wood and start over… which I did. Cost me almost two months.
But now, Ladies and Gentlemen, Here Is ‘The Earl of Alden’, Lovemark Guitar SN# 001…
So that’s it… took about 11 months from drawing to playing. Considering that it’s my first original guitar design and execution, I couldn’t be happier! I know what’s ‘wrong’ with it, but there’s so much right about it! I’ll investigate posting some sound samples soon.
Thanks!