Building the body,
and adding
a veneer top.

The short version

Body work is mostly routing, and routing is mostly template work. So if you did part one properly, a lot of this stage is just execution. What it is not is quick.

The numbers, in one place

Dimension	Figure	Note
Body thickness	1 3/4″	99% of the time
Template allowance	1/8″ all round	Bandsaw to this beforerouteing
Pickup cavity depth	3/4″	Measure your actual pickups
Tremolo cavity depth	5/8″	Check the maker's figure
Cavity cover lip	1/8″ or less	Match your cover material thickness
Cavity floor thickness	1/8″ minimum, ~3/16″ typical	Thinner under a blade switch, see below
Tremolo recess	3/16″ to 1/4″	Preference, some go to 1/2″
Switch slot bit	1/16″	Router, not a Dremel
Neck back angle, set neck	2° to 3°	Gibson style, tune-o-matic
Neck back angle, bolt on	3/4° to 1°	And you can shim a bolt on later
Veneer vs solid cap	cheap vs many times the price	Same figure, very different cost
Vacuum press	a real investment	Small shop setup

Rescuing a marginal board

Most timber is not perfect, and a lot of usable wood gets thrown out because people look at the board instead of looking at what they can get out of the board.

Other things that let a marginal board through:

• Paint grade forgives almost everything. A gouge that would ruin a natural finish is just a smear of filler under paint.
• A big roundover removes the outer edge entirely. Damage in that zone disappears with the profile.
• Offcuts add up. Not enough for half a body might be a third of one, and there is nothing wrong with a body made from three pieces.
• You can cut half a body now and find its partner months later.

The one thing that does not work is two pieces that are both the lower part of the body. You need an upper and a lower, so think about which part of the shape each offcut can give you.

Gluing up a blank

Bandsaw each piece to within 1/8″ of the line, then get the mating faces dead flat. A jointer is the right tool, but a table saw or bandsaw cut cleaned up with a hand plane works too.

Hold the two halves together. You should see a seam and no gaps at all. If light gets through anywhere, back to the jointer you go.

Grain matching

If the body is getting a natural finish, think about how the two halves read together before you commit. Grain running the same way on both sides looks wrong. A mirrored, symmetrical arrangement looks like you meant it. Flip and rotate the halves and pick the pairing that looks consistent.

Watch for discoloration too. Water staining from the way a supplier stored the board is not necessarily fatal, but a color change tells you the composition changed. Different density, different strength, different behavior. Consistency is worth chasing.

The glue up

Even coat, spread properly, not too much. Slide the halves against each other to transfer glue onto both faces. Clamp from the center out, watching that the halves stay flush top and bottom, because they will want to slip on you. You want some squeeze out along the seam, but not all of it. Couple of hours to working strength.

Flattening and cutting the outline

Once it is cured, flatten both faces. A planer if you have one, a random orbital or hand sanding if you do not. And bring it down to 1 3/4″.

Tape the template down, a few small pieces of thin double-sided tape is plenty, keeping that 1/8″ allowance all round. Then rout in multiple passes, dropping the bit each time. The same flush trim bit and the same cheap router from the neck and template stages do the whole job.

For a left-handed body, leave the template on afterward. The face you have been routing against becomes the rear, and you can rout the back cavities off the same setup.

Chip out, and Bondo

It is going to happen. Where the grain runs against the direction the bit is spinning, the cutter grabs the fibers and throws them instead of slicing them.

Prevention: the second you hear or feel it starting, stop. Pull the router away, come at that section from the other direction, and go slow.

Repair: Bondo. Mix a little cream hardener into a lot more filler, put it on, and work fast, because you have five to ten minutes. Scrape the excess off with an old razor while it is still soft and you save yourself a pile of sanding. It fills small holes too.

Once it cures, either put the template back on and reroute, or just sand it flush.

Veneer

Here is why the manufacturers use veneer. A thin flamed maple veneer across a top is cheap. A solid maple cap with the same kind of figure costs many times that. On a finished, flat topped guitar the two look almost identical.

Bookmatching the seam

Slide the two leaves against each other until the figure lines up.

Mark matching reference points on both leaves before you cut, so you can line them back up afterward, then measure over from those and cut the joining edge:

• Straight edge and a fresh razor blade. Several light passes. Do not try to force through both leaves in one cut.
• The old school way is to clamp the leaves between two straight boards and hand plane the edge. It works, it is just slower.

Pinch the joined edges together and look at it. The seam should be almost invisible.

Cutting to shape without tearing

Trace the body outline onto the taped up veneer. Then score along the line with a razor before you cut.

Here is why that matters. Veneer tears along its weakest grain line like a zipper. Cut it with scissors and the tear runs where the grain wants, not where you want. Scoring first breaks that path.

Taping

Veneering tape works like a postage stamp. Wet one side to activate it.

Work short cross pieces first, using your fingers as a clamp to pull the seam tight, then run tape lengthwise. You can also lay one side down, let it grab, and use the tape itself to pull the second leaf across.

The tape goes on the show face, not the glue face. It is semi-transparent once dry, so you can inspect the seam right through it, and it sands off later.

Trim around the outline with a razor, leaving a bit of overlap. Too much overhang cracks in the press. On a body with a heavy roundover a little edge cracking does not matter, since that material is coming off anyway. Without one, get as close to the line as you dare. Save the offcuts for the headstock.

Veneer before you rout, not after

The vacuum press, and the alternatives

A press is a vinyl bag over an MDF platen with air channels routed into it, plus a vacuum source. It is a real investment for a small shop, though it can run off a compressor instead of a dedicated pump.

If you are veneering one body, that is hard to justify. So here are the alternatives:

• Clamp with a shaped caul. A second body blank of the exact same shape on top, both faces dead flat, so the veneer has nowhere to go.
• Contact cement or spray adhesive. Work from one edge and roll it down as you go, because the bond is basically instant on contact.
• Use a thicker leaf, around 1/8″ instead of veneer. It will not warp and you can just clamp it.

Gluing it down

Use a cold press veneer glue. Check the bottle for dried chunks first and get rid of them, because anything that sits proud under the veneer telegraphs straight through to the surface.

Roll on an even, thin coat. Too much glue means a longer set and more chance of the veneer warping.

Line the veneer's seam up with the body's glue seam. That becomes your new centerline, so get it right, and get it right quick, because the veneer starts reacting to the glue inside about a minute.

Into the bag carefully, without shifting anything, clamp, and start pulling air. When it is nearly down, roll the surface, because a trapped bubble in the bag lets the veneer lift right there. Then take it to full vacuum.

For curved surfaces, mist the veneer very lightly with water first so it bends instead of cracks. Be sparing. Too much water and it expands, then shrinks back as it dries, and it can end up too short.

Cavities

With a veneered top, keep your bench clear of debris, because any chip under the body will dent the show face. From here on clamping beats taping. It holds better and it wastes nothing.

Rough out deep cavities with a Forstner bit at the drill press before you rout. It takes out most of the material and saves your router bits a lot of grief.

Depths, and the thickness trap

Remember you only have 1 3/4″ to work with. A 5/8″ tremolo route from the top plus a 3/4″ pickup cavity leaves less than you think, and it is entirely possible to have one cavity meet another coming the other way.

For a cavity cover you need a lip, cut with a rabbeting bit and a bearing sized to give you the rebate width you want. Depth equals your cover material thickness, usually 1/8″ or less.

Drill the electronics holes before you rout the cavity, not after.

Pickup cavities

Measure your actual pickups top to bottom and rout to suit, around 3/4″. The pickup needs room to move for height adjustment.

For direct mounted pickups with no ring, you need to know the neck back angle and the string height off the body first, or you cannot work out the depth. The practical fallback is to rout a little deep and pack it up with washers.

String through ferrules

This section explains something you can see on a surprising number of instruments, factory ones included: the ferrules on the back that are not in a straight line.

The cause is bit wander. A long thin bit flexes under feed pressure. It goes in exactly where you put it and comes out somewhere slightly different, and each hole drifts its own way, so the pattern on the back is never as neat as the pattern on the front.

The method that fixes it

1. Use an old bridge base plate as a drilling template. The spacing is already correct and the holes guide the bit. Any cheap donor bridge works.
2. Line it to the centerline, sitting a little past your scale length mark, because the low E wants to sit further back and the high E further forward, by up to 1/8″.
3. Drill from the front, at the drill press, with a brad point, a quarter inch at a time, lifting to clear between each. Light pressure, because force just increases the flex.
4. Stop before you break through. Let only the very tip of the brad point come out, leaving around 1/16″ of wood.
5. Turn the body over. Those tiny exit points show you where each hole actually ended up.
6. Draw a line between the outermost two, register your template to that line, and drill the larger ferrule holes from the back.

A self centring hinge bit is worth having for the front holes. It sits in the base plate's countersink and stays centerd for you automatically.

Belly cutout and roundover

There are no rules for a belly cut. Size and shape are entirely up to you. Three ways to take the material off:

• Draw knife, working from alternating sides, reversing direction the moment it starts to split.
• Bandsaw a big chunk out first, if yours is big enough.
• Belt sander back and forth. Fastest, and it is what I used here.

Then refine with a draw knife or rasp to take the humps out, and finish with a random orbital.

The roundover

Afterward there is a sharp edge where the roundover ends. Knock it down with 80 grit so the transition is gradual, and sand the fuzz off. Grain filler or primer takes care of whatever is left.

Jigs

The blade switch slot gets cut with a 1/16″ router bit in a purpose built jig: a base notched to match the body outline, with a centerline marked, sized around one specific router. Register the notch and the centerline, clamp, plunge and drag, and you get a perfectly straight slot that is very hard to get any other way.

Do not use a Dremel for this. They wobble and walk and will not cut clean.

And that is the whole argument for jigs. Not just accuracy on this one guitar, but consistency across every guitar you build after it.

Neck back angle

This is the part of body building most likely to get badly botched, because there is no number anybody can hand you.

Working out the angle you need

1. Set the bridge's height adjusters to the middle of their travel, so you have room to go up and down later.
2. Measure from where the bridge sits on the body to the top of the saddle, at the point the string rests.
3. Account for whether the bridge is surface mounted or recessed. A recessed bridge sits lower and needs less angle.
4. Draw a side view: the body, the bridge at that height, and the nut.
5. Nut height is fretboard thickness plus fret height, above the neck surface.
6. Draw the string line from saddle to nut.

With a flat neck pocket, that line pulls away from the fretboard badly as you go up the neck, and the action at the top frets gets unusable. Angling the pocket brings the neck up to meet the string line so the gap stays roughly even. The angle you need is simply the angle you just drew, and a gauge reads it right off.

Construction	Typical back angle
Set neck, tune-o-matic (Gibson style)	2° to 3°
Bolt on (Fender, Ibanez style)	3/4° to 1°
Recessed tremolo	Less, the bridge is already lower

Routing the angle without a jig

Three pieces of straight stock: two as rails either side for the router to ride on, and one shimmed under the back end to tilt the workpiece. The closer the shim sits to the neck pocket, the steeper the angle you get.

Put a level across the rails and shim until they are parallel to the body top. If one side sits lower than the other, you will rout a pocket that is twisted as well as angled.

Tremolo routing

For a Floyd style bridge, two separate depths on the top:

• The section that only clears the arm goes down about 1″.
• The block slot goes all the way through.
• The recess, if you want one, is 3/16″ to 1/4″.

Drill through the block slot before you flip the body, so you know exactly where to start routing the spring cavity on the back. That cavity is usually 5/8″, with a slightly deeper section, another quarter inch or so, behind it, so the block can travel on dives without hitting anything.

What is left is sanding

From here it is surface work, and there is a great deal of it. Burn marks from tooling, scratches, stray tool marks, all of it has to go.

And when something does go wrong, a bit breaks, a chunk tears out, a measurement was off, it is a piece of wood. Work out what would have prevented it, and it will not happen the same way twice.

A note on carved tops

Carved tops in the Les Paul or PRS style are not covered here. You can do them with special router bits, but most builders shape them with spoke shaves, draw knives, rasps and files, working the surface over and over until it looks right, then sanding.

Which points at something worth saying straight out: building a guitar body is one skill, and being good at woodworking is a different one. Practice on scrap before you commit to a board you paid for. There is no shame in going slow.