The Flamelurker - Custom One Piece Walnut Guitar Body Build

Alright, as I start this new

build

I'll do my best to try to record every single thing I do in this once I know I missed some parts of the last

build

, so here we are at the beginning and I've had this slab of hickory. Sitting on a shelf in this garage for about 10 years and I'm going to try to use some up, so the idea for this bill will be a one

piece

body

made from the slab of

walnut

I have. I haven't decided exactly which part of the board to use yet, but I think somewhere in the top left corner it has a nice grain.

I noticed that on this end right here there's a little flame pattern that I really like and like. I want to try to get that into the

body

if I can, this is a bit of a low point here. I think there's a knot there, but I'm not too worried about it being a low point at the moment, the whole body is going to be carved from the front and back, so a slightly low point now isn't a big deal and I really like the grain in this area and I think that's what I want to use, although I also really like how really light this strip is. on the other hand, yeah, and I have to decide exactly how I want to orient this

guitar

, so I decided to use this bottom right corner of the board because I think it has some of the nicest grain.

I just received this jig, it's kind of a rough Les Paul shape. I just extended this part a little bit so it sticks out a little bit from the edge because the idea I have right now, so I'm going to try to keep this kind of direct. border on the board yeah just add a nice little touch to the shape of the body and make it a little unique so I also like that having it like this will keep the grain lighter on the side so everything is nice. of a good solid tone, the reason I'm taking this bottom right corner is because the grain is really nice, it's very straight, I think this board was cut straight from the center of the tree and then it also has a nicer tone . patterns down here and some little dots like this that look a little bit like a flame pattern and hopefully once they start carving the body it will come out a little bit more.

The only real downside to using this part of the board is this crack. It's happening, but I hope that becomes part of the look: how much of the edge is comfortable to cut along the edge of the board and also how do I want to align the grain because it has this kind of curve over here over here try something like this I'm going to mark the center line before we even start yeah, yeah, okay, I can see that, yeah, so I'm not claiming this Les Paul fish shape to be the final design, but it's a really good kind of starting point for begin.

I'm going to look at it a bit to see if I can figure out what exactly I want to do with it in the end. It is not like this. I want to get this cut out of here without just cutting it. the whole board in half because I want to keep as much of this as possible in one

piece

, so this is about the final shape. I ended up deciding to keep this part up here just because I think that's how it will be. It's easier to carve the surface if I have this outside curve instead of having an inside curve right there and then I also have a center line drawn to help with the next parts.

I don't know how well the camera can see it and I really can't, but unfortunately there are all kinds of flames throughout this entire area leading up to here. It's not really obvious, but there are quite a few there and I hope once it starts. carving the surface is going to show up a lot more, it's a thing I just did off camera, so I drilled a hole here and put this rod in, so it looks great in there, so I'm a little worried that this crack will spread when I try put the bridge here so this Stella rod goes all the way through and it should help keep this in one piece.

I'm just going to lay out how I want a car on the surface, nothing too crazy is lowering the edges, but I need to mark a spot around the center where I don't want a particular car to show because I'm going to use pickup rings that are flat bottom and they are somewhere near the refrigerator, close to an exact science right now. I'm not going to go directly to these lines or anything. I know I want to keep this area flat, so I circled roughly where the pickup rings would be. I also want the surround and bridge to stay flat because I don't know. exactly where the bridge should go but it's just a general idea but the bridge i'm using this time on the bottom is flat so i can't size underwear that can go where is the pick up ring i'm wearing? right now it's just gold colored plastic which i might end up using on this, i'm not sure when the gold will look really good next to the

walnut

but i have another idea i might try but i think it will be a little prettier, something like That's been a while.

I already cleaned this doll rug, so it should be completely dense. This crack should extend further than it already is and this is terribly wrong and obviously this is extremely visible right now. but since the connector is going to go in right here, this will not be visible on the final

guitar

. Another thing I did was clean these two raw edges with just a wire brush to get all the dirt off. I left this kind of really nice coloring here that I really want to keep, so I'm not going to sand them as much as I can help it, okay?

And you're forced a little bit to clean up most of the material for the pocket and then I'm going to go in later with the router and okay, I cut and routed the Nook pocket. I think I fell a little short. I'll probably have to cut a little deeper to get the neck to fit perfectly. The template also has a neck breaker angle already built in, so the pocket is cut to the angle I wanted for this particular guitar and the neck you can see here is the last neck I bought. That's why I'm still screwing it in once I start making mine.

I'll probably make neck sets with this neck, they say it's Brazilian. Both the shaft and the fingerboard with a trapezoid for all inlays. It looks like a really nice mast. but I can do the test fit, it fits very well there, it is very tight and I lift it only by the neck joint, but I need to cut the pocket a little deeper because I see at the base a space under the fingerboard. which I don't want to have so that's next, now that most of the carving is done I went ahead and marked the exact position I need for my bridge and marked the three holes I need to drill for the screws, that's good. using this to fill the channel over here so the pickup wires can run up here and then into the back pocket, so I made a quick and dirty routing jig just to get a nice, even space for the backplate not It is good to drill a path for the ground wire to the jumper in the cavity at the back and there you are drilling the initial hole for the jack.

Now that all the main work on the body is done, I can start sanding it. to your final finish, start with a nice big random orbital sander with a 220 grit pad. I do the edges with my smaller orbit end sander, also 220 grit, lots of spots on the end here, it's very difficult know if that's what I'm seeing. There are scratches that I still need to sand out or if they are more of these natural cracks in the wood or if it's just part of the grain because the grain gets really crazy here around 320 grit hand sanding using one of the offcuts from the body as a improvised sanding block.

I'm going to continue sanding this by hand, but you really don't want to see it, so I'll come back later. Okay, so I just finished cutting out this space here or the What happens is when I look at this, it sticks out really far from the body. I didn't really want to do that, so I did it, so I marked the space that the plate covers. I'm going to try to embed it. Some lace went into the body and cleaned up the dermal marks, so I mentioned before that I had a more interesting idea than using the plastic rings, so what I'm trying to do now is make my own set of pickups. sounds from this leftover piece of birdseye maple from a previous build.

I have something else I'd like to try a little later, but we'll get to that if they survive, that's the time to The truth is, these bird's eye maple pickup rings did survive by cutting them to the correct thickness and you can finish making them and using them, they don't survive if I guess I use the plastic rings. I have one to make a back plate with some walnut pieces. veneer in this case because none of the cuts from when I made the body are big enough to make the back plate and I don't want to waste any more of that big board just cutting a piece just for the back plate.

So doing it this way, the last thing with these pickup rings I felt like the maple was too bright next to the walnut, it's just like it's really dark once it's wet so the finish will make it a little bit brighter. dark, so play. with fire yeah now I need to brush these which is basically the last place they could really break me but they have survived everything so far what's done looks pretty good not too bad okay last step these rings collection. I'm just going to put a quarter two of polyurethane on and I'm using it specifically because I want a harder finish on these just to protect them a little bit more and since polyurethane yellows a little bit, that should give them a nice color as well.

Alright, I'm going to drill the screws that will hold the back plate in place. I'm going to do three of these corners. I don't think there's enough room to put one in there, there's plenty of room around here. There's also a hole right there, the wires that I want to avoid, so I'm a little bit higher up like this, they're here sort of in the corner that takes care of that. Yes, I have the body that he polished. your 600 grit and I already removed all the dust. I'm ready to start applying the finish. It's a fresh first coat with some paper towel that shows up very quickly.

Okay, so I'm going to leave this hanging here for a few hours. and go back and see if it needs another coat, so I let the body sit and cure or rather hang and cure for a little over a week and you know, the finish just isn't curing properly, it's still very tacky. in many places it is dry but sticky. What I'm going to do now is go and apply a coat of polyurethane over the top of the oil finish, which is not unusual and is also a hard finish on top of the oil that has already penetrated the wood and will protect a little more the wood itself.

In the future, I will explain this a little more and focus on what I am doing for those Those who are familiar with oil finishes know that excess oil should be wiped off as soon as it begins to cure and that oil cures faster at temperatures higher. I suspect what happened with this finish is that the oil was curing faster than I thought. due to the hot weather at the time I was applying it, which resulted in a sticky finish. After some research I discovered that because polyurethane is an oil based finish it adheres well with other oil finishes so I was able to avoid the problem and despite the complications this still resulted in a really beautiful finish that will do great job protecting the body from dents and scratches so at this point all the work on the body is pretty much done, next step will be I'm wiring so I need to do some quick assembly.

We have the pickups mounted on the cup rings. Now let's get a little further into the exact position of these before permanently attaching them to the tape. Put them down so they don't fall while I'm wiring. I had just a second's pause to clean them up. They were full of gunk from all over the finish, so I'm using this type of bridge first, I wasn't entirely sure. How I wanted to connect the ground wire. I tried soldering but the solder just doesn't want to stick to this for some reason, maybe some trick I don't know about, but either way I can screw this with the side I'm on. contact with the ground wire is fine when I'm pretty soft that's not going anywhere yeah I notice I'm using black screws for this instead of gold.

I felt like the blacks did a better job of blending into the burnt birdseye maple than the gold screws did and I felt like these would look better overall, yes the next thing I did was put the tuners on and for this I went ahead and got some nice Grover locking tuners, that's the next thing I need to make a truss rod cover and I'm going to To use up what's left of this piece of birdseye maple that I used for the covers and just to continue with this steam of fire and burn, I'm going to burn this too.

I went back and sanded a bunch. of the carbonization on the right side of this to create a lighter strip on the right side just to match the body because the wood on the body has a lighter strip on the right side if I'm going to end up again using the polyurethane, what a piece of truth, fortunately there was no waypossible to get this out of here after the head was cut off so I just had to file it completely off and unfortunately the process of trying to make it the original truss rod cover just broke.

Half of what I did was go ahead and create a new one. I'm going to pronounce this one with zero layer or a day without layer. I'm not sure what the correct way to say it is. I've only seen it written. This was leftover from the guitar. I made it last year, so try this and I'll paint the. symbol on him later, the crazy thing is I don't even know why he cut his head off with the first one. I'm not even turning the screw very hard at the moment, so it's just my fingertips, that was fine unless there was a bad screw or something but that's it done and ditching the neck pickup Oh, nice pickup , ok I'm back with the neck pickup again and now for more than just the strings it plays that very well but there's no rich pickup, same thing here it's a little better at that point it's still not . cool, yeah, it's fun, it's doing the distortion all the way, no, that quarter of that stuff again, this is still in the rich makeup, then another part again and back to the next review, do both, It is a solid one-piece walnut guitar edge. with gold hardware, I have a set of bare knuckle pickups, it's a caterpillar model on the neck and the cold sweat on the bridge really liked this bridge pickup I mentioned before, it's a Brazilian Evany neck and fingerboard because it feels all right play on this neck and then I have the groove takeover there with the symbol painted before.

It's hard for me to say if the camera can see that because it's a little far away right now. Yes, I'm very happy with how this guitar turned out. the wood grain is a nice surprise, it's really beautiful, the finish looks fantastic despite the problems it had and it plays very well, it stays in tune very well, yes it's the best guitar I've made so far.