Building a guitar body, part 6

This post is a continuation of my series on building a body for my 4 string guitar project. This will be an electric baritone ukulele, or short scale 4 string electric guitar, depending on how you look at it. The baritone ukulele uses the D, G, B, and high E strings of a guitar, tuned the same way.

My last post about this project was about 2 months ago. You can read that post at this link.
https://steemit.com/guitar/@amberyooper/building-a-guitar-body-part-5

I had not done any work on the body for the past couple of months because I couldn't make up my mind about where I wanted to put the volume and tone controls on the body, and how to mount them. I had thought about mounting the controls from the back of the body, but drilling the holes for the controls is more tricky from the back, and it's easier to mess it up. I finally decided to drill holes from the front to make a cavity for the controls and mount the controls to a plate that would cover the cavity. This is a fairly common method that a lot of guitar makers use.

Once that was decided, I had to figure out where to put the controls, and how to drill flat bottom holes for the cavity. Since this is a custom project, there are no instructions for how to go about doing any of this stuff, so I had to make the decisions as I got to that part of the project. Sometimes it takes me a while to make up my mind with stuff like this. Some people call that "analysis paralysis".

Here's what the guitar body looked like before I started on the cavity for the controls.

I don't have any type of drill bits that will make a flat bottomed hole in wood. There's a couple of different ones on the market, but they're a bit expensive and I didn't want to buy one for a one off project, so I improvised. I used one of my hole saws of about the right diameter for the size of the holes that I wanted, and I adjusted the center drill of the arbor so that it only stuck out about 1/2 inch from the edge of the saw teeth. I set the drill press to drill a fairly shallow hole in the body, about 3/4s of an inch deep or so. I put one hole on each side of the hole in the side for the guitar cord jack. That will make it easy to wire up the pickup and the controls to the jack.

After starting the basic holes in their positions, I put a 1/4 inch drill bit in the drill press and drilled out the wood inside the circles as best I could. Then I got out a couple of my carving chisels and started removing the rest of the wood from inside the circle cuts. I used the drill press to help me cut the holes to a depth that would fit the control pots with only the shaft sticking out above the body.

Once I got that done to my satisfaction, I used the drill press to drill out much of the wood between the holes to form a slot that connects the holes. I cleaned out the rest of the wood and smoothed out the bottom of the slot with the chisels. When I was done, I had a pretty decent cavity for the volume and tone controls and all the wiring necessary. It's a bit rough, but it will be covered with the cover plate that the controls will be mounted to. In this picture, you can also see the mounting holes for the bridge pieces, and the repair that I had to make for one of the holes. I covered that in a previous post.

The next thing on the list is to decide how to ground the 4 separate bridge pieces, if I'm going to do that, and then decide what I want to do for a finish on the body. I'm not sure if I'm going to use a clear oil finish, or a red stain oil finish. I'm leaning toward the clear finish, to show off the bird's eye detail of the wood. I thought about a clear lacquer finish, but I'm not equipped to do something like that. I hope it doesn't take me as long to decide on the finish as it did on the controls placement, because I'd like to get this project done so that I can actually play it. I don't want to put the parts on it and wire it up until after I put the finish on the body, because I would just have to take all the parts back off to finish it.

Well, that's all I have for this post. Thanks for stopping by to check it out!