Build for my Daughter - Proud Father

[Radiohead]

Hey all,

So a few weeks ago my 9 year old daughter saw my playing around with the Custom Shop Generator and thinking it was sort of a cool toy, she of course wanted to try it out. She enjoyed playing around and came up with some cool designs. I have some extra parts from other projects laying around, so I decided to take things a little further. I picked up an Alder body blank and offered to help her make her first guitar.

I am so proud, she came up with the build concept herself (OK - a little coaching from me). She wants a Dinky Body Shape with Reverse Pointy Headstock. White Body with Bright Pink Polka-dots, Black Headstock, H-S, with Floyd. Rock On

I feel so fortunate. This has been such great bonding time with my daughter. She is really into it and does not want me working on the project without her! We are putting a half hour here and there and taking our time.

I thought I would share the process in this build post and share the progress every so often.

Hope you guys enjoy and please share your comments...

Rough Body Shape...


Rough Belly Cut...

[straycat]

Very cool good luck with it.

[Cliff]

Great story. Best of luck to you, and I hope you both enjoy the process and the results.

[TKEblue]

That's awesome man, I hope to do this kinda thing with my kids if I ever have any and wish my dad would have done something like this with me when I was growing up.

[moku]

awesome project!

[Rsmacker]

What a cool Dad you are, well done.

Now, just so long as you don't build guitars out of bicycles and fireplaces and bits of household junk, like Brian Fucking May and his Dad, I hope she goes on to play well. Even if she loses interest in the guitar quickly, time well spent.

[Johnnyryche]

Very cool. Looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

[RacerX]

Awwwwwww!

[DalyTek]

This is awesome! Looking forward to watching how it comes along!
I always love build threads, but even more so when there's something like this behind it.

[Trem]

That's awesome, Is it a short scale tho? She's only 9... hehe, i can see it now - "Dad will show you how to play, no just watch dad.. hold on honey, just watch dad, ok, you can have it in a sec, hold on" lol

[Trussrod]

Impressive work! Does the bit have a top bearing and did you make the template yourself?

[guitarsjb]

Cool!!

[sully]

Very cool!

Sully

[Radiohead]

Hey Guys, Thanks for the Props...

My daughter and I have slowly continued with the project. She begins to lose interest after about a 1/2 hour, so we don't get a lot done, but she wants to work on it every day. We have made lots of small mistakes but we are having tonnes of fun along the way. I enjoy everything about the guitar so much, it is really special to share even a small portion of my interests with her

I was able to pick up a Jackson 24 fret Reverse pointy neck with tuners and a Jackson Floyd at a reasonable price. So we are good to go. Building a neck would be way over my head right now.

The templates I am using, I picked up online, which is making my first build way easier. I could not do this from scratch. The router bit I am using is called a template bit and the bearing is on top of the blades which allows you to route material within the guides of the template. The problem with the templates, is that they are cut out of 1/4 inch material that is way to thin. I keep jumping the router and cut into the template... Also, for shallow cuts, I need to build up the height of the template, so I purchased some 3/4 MDF and made some new templates out of the thicker 3/4 inch material.











I screwed up the neck pocket and made so many mistakes on this part of the build. On my rough cut, using a jig saw, I accidently dug into the side of the neck pocket when cutting out the lower horn and I also cut the base of the neck pocket about about 3/8 of an inch too short. Lastly, after spending so much time making a template for the neck pocket, when I was routing out the material, my bit had become loose and kept dropping my depth. Ouch. Anyway, I leveled out the pocket, added some scrap alder material in the base of the pocket and redid the route. It a good thing this guitar will be painted with solid colours.











My daughter filing down the plugs in the neck I picked up...



Got the neck mounted today.



I am thinking about pickups. I have a SD JB that I will use in the bridge. Can anyone recommend a good neck pu? I recently played a Charvel Promod with an Evolution in the neck and thought it sounded excellent. Does anyone know if you can get an Evolution in a stacked single?

[~K~]

Hot rails sound good. Quarter pounders sound good as well ... both hot

Project is coming along well... good job