Making an Ocean

I'm glad to share with you the process of building an Ocean Guitar. Here I will be posting photos of the process. You can see small pictures with notes below them. You can magnify these pictures clicking over them.

I hope you enjoy this as well as I enjoy building the guitar. Jorge Villavicencio.

May 9, 2009

It's time to apply the laquer. After applying several coats of sealer, I sand it until having a flat surface, ready for the laquer. I apply 10 coats of laquer, waiting 15 minutes between them. After that I will wait one week to let the finishing dry perfectly.

February 15, 2009

Now, it's time for fretboard related stuffs. First I did the fretboard radius. I use 16" radius since it gives me chance to have the strings very close to the fretboard. Then, I spent a couple of hours sanding the fretboard to give it a shinny finish.

After having the fretboard ready, I started to install the frets. To do that, I built a special tool to press the frets firmly into the fretboard. It is a very simple lever, but it is a time saver tool.

On the first picture you can see the fret just before it is pressed. On the second picture, you see the fret pressed firmly into the fretboard. On the next pictures you can see all the frets on their position. Next to come: level the frets on their sides and finish the fret work...

February 9, 2009

This time I started to route the cavity to hold the neck into the body. As you can see, I started doing a playwood template to guide the router.

I realized that the unknown wood I used for the fretboard is actually cocobolo.

I prepared a flat and thin piece of cocobolo to glue it over the headstock. First I band saw it by the middle to give it a bookmatch effect, and then glued it on the headstock. By this time, I've already glued the fretboard on the neck, as you can see in the pictures.

Finally, here is the guitar as it will be. You can notice the great grain and design of the cocobolo fretboard and headstock.

February 2, 2009

Here you can see the wood I used for the fretboard. I'm not sure what kind of wood is, but I suspect that is cocobolo, since it is very dark. It is hard as a rock, so it will work perfectly.

I've worked on the neck also and here you can see how it looks.

This is more or less how the guitar will look.

January 24, 2009

First, any VC-Guitar starts with a basic step: a real size paper layout. This way, I can see how it will look and make any small adjustement if needed.

After having the paper layout, I cut a playwood template that will be used to route the borders of the guitar, after band sawing the wood.

One important step before drawing the template on the wood is to flat the surfaces of both parts. I use a portable planer to do that. This way I have a perfect plain surface on the front and the back of the guitar.

Then, I draw the contour of the guitar using my template.

Here you can see the template as well as the back and the front of the guitar.

Now is time to glue up both parts. The glue will dry 24 hours.

Now that the glue is completely dried, is time to band saw. The real work is just begining!!!

After band sawing a couple of hours, the playwood template shows its real value. I use it to smooth the borders using a router. This way, the contour of the guitar will have a nice look.

Here you can see the result of routing the borders . It is not finished yet, but it is smooth enough to see how the guitar will look.

These pictures shows some carving I made on the top

More to come...