Hello, my name is James Cherry and I’m in Year nine. Throughout Year 9 or the Middle Years Program. Each student has been given the task to choose a project that has to be completed throughout the year 2011. This gave us students to choose something that they enjoyed doing and had a passion for. I took quite a lot of thought into what I was going to do for the whole year, then I came to a final decision. I was going to make a Electric Guitar.
To start this project I ordered the wood (I ordered two pieces of Tasmanian Oak hard wood 190cm with a thickness of 19mm and another two pieces 230cm with a thickness of 19 mm glued, clamped, and biscuited) this was what I used to make the body of the guitar.
I had to draw many designs on tracing paper to decide what shape the guitar would be. Once I had decided what shape I was going to use I had to refine it and make sure that I was 100% happy with the shape. Then I traced around the shape onto the hard wood.
The neck placement was one of the more difficult sections of making an electric guitar because you need to be so precise in order for the neck to sit properly in the guitar. Once I had transferred the shape of the body onto the wood I took apart the two pieces of wood and cut the neck placement out using a jigsaw on the first piece. I had to have the exact measurements otherwise the neck wouldn’t sit properly resulting the in the guitar not working. I then screwed the two pieces of wood together and screwed the neck into place.
For the shape of the pickups I had to attack 2 pieces of string to the Second and the fifth machine head on the neck and line up the second and fifth middle screws in the humbucker pickups and the bridge. This gave me the exact point on where the bridge and the pickups needed to be. Once I had drawn the pickups. I had to drill holes 4 holes around the pickups big enough for the jigsaw blade to be able to fit through to enable me to cut around the pickups. I used a jigsaw to get the rough position of the pickups then I used a router to able me to smooth the edging and get the definite shape.
