Free guitar building course · Part 3
Building the body,
and adding
a veneer top.
Nearly two hours on turning a blank into a body: joining, shaping, routing every cavity, and laying a veneer top without bubbles or blown-through edges.
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Chapter markers coming — paste the timestamps from the video description into the chapters field in videos.py and they become clickable here.
What this covers
- Jointing and glueing up a body blank
- Rough cutting, then routing to the template
- Pickup, control and switch cavities — depth, order and clearance
- Neck pocket accuracy, which decides the whole guitar's geometry
- Applying a veneer top without bubbles or starved glue lines
- Roundovers, edge treatment and cleanup
Cut order matters
Route cavities before rounding the edges. A rounded edge leaves the bearing nothing flat to ride on, and the router will follow the curve into your body. The same logic runs through the whole stage: every cut should leave a good reference surface for the cut after it.
The neck pocket is the one to be slow about. Its depth sets your action range and its angle sets the break angle over the bridge. A pocket a millimetre too deep cannot be undone, and no amount of setup will rescue it.
Written companion in progress.
Watch the builds on YouTube
Full build videos, start to finish, including the parts that went wrong.
Build series · New video most months