New Guitar Project: LP Junior Build – Part Three

We’re cutting out the body, right?

I used a jigsaw to cut the excess wood away, and then attached a template to the body.

I screwed it down in a place where I would be routing the pickup cavity anyway.

I made the template from a full-size drawing of a Les Paul. It’s slightly different than a Les Paul Junior; the Les Paul has a smooth transition from the cutaway to the neck, but the Junior doesn’t. You can see it here:

And here:

I prefer the smooth transition of a Les Paul:

And after all, it’s my guitar.

Which reminds me of a joke: [holds up middle three fingers of right hand] Do you know why Madonna can’t masturbate with these  fingers? Because they’re my Godd@mn fingers!

Good grief, that’s awful. Where was I?

Since I was going to do a smooth transition, I needed to leave some wood near the neck mortise. 

By milling the mortise with the blank uncut, and then by leaving excess, I could save the wood that would be in the joint area. If I tried to mill it first, the joint would be more obvious. As usual by now, we’ll see more later.

I routed the Les Paul shape into the trimmed blank:

After a few passes, I could take the template off and the router bearing would ride on the finished edge:

 Eventually, I flipped the body over and used a flush-trim it to get rid of the last bit of excess. Going different ways on the wood makes for some uneven grain patterns, but this guitar is getting a solid paint finish, so it didn’t matter.

Once the body was shaped, I used the 1/4″ roundover bit to round over (duh) the edges.

I needed to place the controls, and for once I wanted them to be in the factory position. It’s funny what you can and cannot find on the internet. I could find exacting dimensions of the 4 controls of a Les Paul, but not for a Junior. I assumed the top two controls of a Les Paul were the same, but I wanted to be sure. 

Doing an image search, I turned up this little gem:

Which, in case you can’t tell, is a template for locating the controls. I printed it out and lined up the edge and boom, I had my controls. I drilled those holes through the face and then aligned the control cavity on the back. The cavity I made is much bigger than the factory one, but that’s for a good reason (which I will explain later).

This body needs a neck, don’t you think?