Lightbluemk2

Hey guys, this is one of hopefully two challenge builds, but that all depends on how I go for time in the next few months. To start off good luck to the other users entering!

Anyway, I realise this has been done before, it's not a unique idea, but I thought I'd give it a go since the end product is something a bit different. I'm making a puzzle guitar, made out of big ol' puzzle pieces cut from purpleheart, sapele, and pine.



Im sure I'll be buying more materials for this than just whats pictured, but hey this is where I started.

I started off drawing up a puzzle piece in AutoCAD and checked it would all tile togeather niecly, I also the 2d drawing for the guitar, getting an idea how I wanted it to look.







I have the use of a laser cutter so at this stage I programmed and lasered out the template to ensure it would be accurate. From here I cut a new template manually and used the laser cut template to make the master template.

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Chur

Lightbluemk2

From here I band sawed the pieces out of the 3 woods, keeping the grain always in the same direction of course! Then routed to shape. Didn't take any photos at this stage but I'm sure you all get the idea.

First piece





And another



End of the first two days



Such a b**tch cutting and routing all these out. Never again will I make a guitar like this.

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Chur

Lightbluemk2

TRIPLE POST

I also used my dremel to cut small voids into the sides of the pieces as I will be using black tinted epoxy to glue these togeather, as I could never ensure perfect gaps between each piece and the voids will allow more epoxy to be present in the joins



Now for some failures; had plenty of small tear outs routing the curves in all these pieces, the purpleheart especially was prone to it, glue and sawdust fix approach mainly, in worse cases I cut them square and glued in new timber pieces





This one was a right mess



plenty of small square cut offs under the bandsaw at the end of the day!



Also did some experimenting tinting epoxy with graphite powder. My worry here is I don't want the black to seep into the timbers themselves, but I'd like nice black lines around the pieces.

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Chur

Lightbluemk2

Quad post, should have put some rough specs, still figuring them out but the idea is this:

Body: P/h, sapele, pine
Neck: P/h sapele laminated with super thin pine strips - much like the maple ones on my oliver builds

Elec: 1x Paf hum, 1x single coil, series/split/parallel for the hum, 2x vol, 2x tone, kill switch. Towing with the idea of preamped piezo's

Bridge: Gotoh tom - string through with aluminium tonebar in the rear
Tuners: Gotoh rotomatics

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Chur

C_Hart

this looks like it will be SO sweet. cant wait for more

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bghk6581

Great idea. I was thinking about doing a puzzle guitar, but I was just going to do the top in puzzle. Can't wait to see the finished product.

ethan_hanus

Do you own a lumber yard or something? That's a bunch of solid wood blocks you got there. Looking promising so far.

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Lightbluemk2

Uhhh, which photo are you referring to? I didn't think I had that much!

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Chur

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ethan_hanus

The one with all the chunks off wood just lying on the floor.

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Nezzingo

If you look at the picture with the scissors handles in it, I think those chunks are probably 1 inch squares on a table

Lightbluemk2

Yeah those are all the offcuts from where I cut out the knob part of the puzzle pieces, I cut the edges out square then cut around closer to the edge, 4 per piece makes for a big box of little offcuts I have nothing to do with, might make knobs out of them?

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Chur

sytharnia1560

man I have always wanted to do a jigsaw build but ain't skilled enough with a router to take it on....look forward to seeing this progress.

must get my 100E build started

Lightbluemk2

Did a few more pieces, I'll be glad when they're all done and I won't have to cut out any more. You can see a poor repair job in the middle purpleheart piece, after thickness sanding it should be gone thankfully, the humbucker should be in its place regardless.



Also my test mixing graphite powder with epoxy worked well, after sanding no colour had seeped into the timber, so I'll do it again when I glue the pieces together and should hopefully get nice black lines around the pieces

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Chur

metalhead352

Looking good!

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Ippon

Man, do you need an extra level of OCD to pull off something like this?

So looking forward to this! Good Luck!

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bghk6581

Looks really good. As for the epoxy, I would recommend a slow curing, low viscosity epoxy. This way, the epoxy will have time to go between the pieces and the bubbles will have time to rise to the top and pop. I'm experimenting with coloring epoxy myself. I might try graphite powder to see how it does.

-Blue-

Got to say, this is one of the builds I'm most interested in on here. Awesome idea, can't wait to see how it turns out!

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Lightbluemk2

Thanks guys,

Ippon not ocd, just a bit of patience.
bghk6581 I agree completely, I'm just going to use less hardener next time and really flood it, let it sink down into the gaps

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Chur