Building a Trekker - Page 2

2017-05-26

Start With a Stick

Here is the block I was building. The plans say to start with a solid chunk of wood but they will have me cut out the centre anyway.

After planing (on a Radial Arm Saw yet) And boring a hole it looks like this:

Gluing some more bits together to for a "2x10"... note how little of a 2x10 I would have used. Even this will be cut down quite a lot.

A little bit of slimming... note the shape of the side. That is where I got the lining for the Mandocello. Lots of sanding and chiselling too. The two "fork tines" still have a lot of sanding to do before they will bend as they should. The neck will need much shaping too.

It ends up looking much like this. I added veneer to this headstock too for looks and to allow my fret board to end in the right place. Angle cuts are hard. The curved bit is what happened to the second chunk of wood I glued together. The "fork tines" will be spread out to match.

Pretty as it looks now, there is still much sanding and shaping to do. I have cut two rectangles for the front and back, but I still need to route out a cavity for the truss rod, which is on order, finish shaping the head stock, which has tuning machines on order, and the back of the neck is far from shaped too. The back of the headstock is not parallel to the front and the tail block needs to be planed to the same thickness as the sides.

While this guitars purpose is to be light and small, I can see there may be times when the quiet nature of it's sound may just not be enough. So I have ordered a humbucker pickup, switch and pot. I am hoping to get 5 unique sounds by wiring the two coils in the pickup in various ways.