I decided I wanted to make a telecaster. My first plan was to build a body blank by gluing up a bunch of pine planks we have around the house. I had it all figured out, but when I explained my plan to my wife, she quickly proved it would never work because I'd have to plane the boards down too much, so if I wanted the right depth I'd have to glue them three deep and three across and if you figure out the math and divide the cosine by the tangent of the hypotenuse we totally don't have enough wood.
Then she said "Why don't you use those big thick boards we got from your mom?"
Big thick boards? Holy moley! There are three of them, all of them too small for a tele body, drat. I tried to fit them together in a way that I could glue them up to make one body but there was no way to do it that made sense.
I'm still not sure what I want to do with the other two boards, but this one I decided I'd turn into a plankocaster. Simplest possible thing.
And, I'm going to do it without the use of any power tools. As my wife says, if you're working with hand tools, you make mistakes way slower. (She built a book case and put the dados in with a wood chisel!)
Here's the board. I figured it was pine. It's super light, and when you tap it, it rings like a bell.
It's totally amazing and I can't wait until I completely screw it up. First step is to tape up a plan:
Make sure it's lined up square on the plank:
Start chiseling out wood:
And when that smell hits the nose. it is the most amazing thing, this isn't pine, it's CEDAR! And it's very fractury, it wants to split along the grain like nobody's business. I better make a stop cut all along the neck pocket just in case:
It comes out so fast and so easy I'm taking it really slow:
I can't tap it the other direction because it splits like nobody's business and I'm afraid the chisel will get away from me!
Here's a night's work:
Look at how tight that grain is! And how massive this tree must have been!
Like I said, I can't wait until I completely screw it up.