Carving Lacerda

Lacerda needs cavities. Specifically, it needs pickup cavities, a control cavity, a toggle switch cavity, and an input jack cavity.

So we must do these things.

First, we sketch out the cavities on the back.

The triangular shape is the control cavity, and the lower one is for a  **recessed input jack like you find on Stratocasters:**

[](http://sean.thewhatsgoodconspiracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Y1.jpg)[](/batch.download.php?aid=8635947)

I wanted to put the input jack someplace inconspicuous but accessible. I didn’t want it on the side of the guitar since this body is designed to be played both sitting and standing.

I had put the input jack on the side of the last one of these I built and it was a big part of why the guitar didn’t work out properly. So no more mistakes like that!

One consideration when making control cavities is that there are two steps involved. The first step is to rout out a big hole where you will later put all the knobs an d switches.

The second step is to rout a small shelf that the cavity cover will rest on. For standard guitars there are standardized cavity and cover templates. Stewart MacDonald sells them and I own them as well:

This guitar  is hollow, but you can see how it works:

This method allows you to have a recessed cavity cover and place for screws to hold the cover on. I needed that same thing.

But these templates wouldn’t work for me; the odd shape of Lacerda means that it needs a custom cavity.

So first things first: a hole saw. It’s a drill bit with a set of attachments that allow you to drill large (or small) holes. I got one in Mongkok a while back for about HK$25. It looks like this:

So using the proper size (i,e, one closest to the drawing), I drilled the corners of the cavity:

This did two things. One, it started getting rid of the wood where I wanted the cavity to be. Two, it gave me a nice rounded corner.

I didn’t drill all the way through the guitar, just low enough to get the saw portion as deep as I could get it. Once that was done, I could break off the parts in the middle. Here’s a photo of that process:

Then I used a large Forstner bit in the drill press to remove or ‘hog out’  a lot of the wood in the cavity. You can use a router for this, but I figure that it’s easier and smarter to use the cheap drill bit than the expensive router bit. I try to save the router for the finer work when I can.

You can see here that I also started hogging out the input jack recess. What I am trying to do at this point is simply remove excess wood. Once that is done, I use the router to clean up the cavities.

I didn’t get a photo of it at  this stage, but I used a straight edge and a flush cut bit to rout the straight lines in to the wood. Going progressively deeper, I cleaned up the whole rout. Then I used a router bit like this:

This bit allowed me to get a small shelf or lip around the cavity so I could recess the cavity cover.

But the input jack cavity would require a little more. Here you can see the cavity on the face of a stratocaster, in the lower right of the photo:

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I needed to make one of those on the back of Lacerda. So I took one of my stratocaster bodies that is currently disassembled and put a piece of clear plexiglas over the cavity. I secured it with double-stick tape.

Using a drill bit and a flush-cut router bit, I quickly made a hole in the plexiglas the exact size and shape of the cavity:

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Using this template and the router, I cleaned up the input jack cavity:

You can see here that I also made the cavity cover for the control rout. Partially visible as well is the neck joint area. Here I used a forstner bit to make recesses for the neck ferrules.

Forstner bits are drill bits that make flat-bottom holes. You can see it in the photo of the control cavity above.

Ferrules are round pieces of metal that can be used instead of a neck plate on guitars.  Most ‘bolt-on’ guitars use a neck plate to provide strength and keep the screws from compressing the wood at the neck joint:

Ferrules allow you to not use the neck plate, and to place the screws in something other than the traditional rectangular array:

Ferrules also allow you to reduce the thickness of the body at the neck heel. This makes the guitar a little more comfortable to play at the higher part of the neck.

I recessed the ferrules and, using a random orbital sander with 60 grit (very coarse) disks, removed some thickness at the neck joint. You can see the affected areas, which are lighter than the wood I didn’t sand.



Sorry I didn’t take photos of this part. Sometimes when I get working on something, I get a little… focused, and forget to document the process.

But I think you can get the idea from the photos.

Next up is the front of the body. I used the same process (Forstner bits, then router templates) for the neck and pickup cavities. I didn’t get photos of the humbucker routs, but here’s the neck cavity:

You can see the holes for the neck screws as well as the small holes left by the tip of the Forstner bit. You can also see that I sealed the body with a coat of lacquer. It is still very rough, but we’ll see why in the next installment of *****The Lacerda Chronicles.*