Design
The guitar is a bit of an experiment – to incorporate a small arm carve and an F-hole. The body will be chambered to keep the weight down and the PRS control cavity will help too. I’m using this to help accommodate the separate partial split switches without crowding. A new cavity template will also be made – the picture below shows the insert before it was cut out.
Build
Careful body glue up! Five strips of ash, sapele and oak with two wider strips of walnut for the central spine of the back. Oak, sapele and ash with a poplar blank for each half of the back. Both sides were then glued to the central spine and thicknessed. The body had the usual routing for weight relief and wiring channels and the inner was shaped to match the outer belly carve – this area was ‘finished’, since it will be visible through the F-hole.
The top has carefully joined ash with wenge and walnut forming the central stripe. This was thicknessed and glued to a one piece sheet of mahogany. The resulting top had the F-Hole carefully cut close to the line with a scroll saw and then carved with a very sharp knife (and chamfered on the inside).
The neck is much simpler – I had been given a lovely piece of sapele – perfectly quarter sawn and exactly 20mm thick and pretty much finished – and just wide enough – so it was ideal for a one piece neck. The fretboard is wenge.
Finished Guitar
The finished guitar turned out to be everything I had hoped for. The Epiphone ProBucker pickups sound great and the PRS-style splits work well.
The weight is perfect and the slightly repositioned f-hole looks nice. Even the poplar middle section looks good with a bit of figure exposed in the belly carve. A lot of people won’t ever use oak on a guitar, but I think the back looks great.
