What steaming pile of sacrilegious butchery is this?

[memecode]

Today I drove out to the edge of the city where there is a timber store that has all sorts of interesting wood. I got some ash and rosewood to practice on. I've chopped it to shape and marked out roughly where the pickups are. The plan now is to cut it like I would the real thing. And see how the mechanisms work in practice. I do already have the brass parts I need. Lots of fiddly work ahead.

 

[mayfly]

Pins and needles here! very keen to see how it goes. Please post pictures, even mistakes

 

[vernschrock]

If you’re building the body yourself, you can make a lam top the same thickness as you want your “white keys”. Cut your keys out of that lam top (using either a bandsaw or Japanese hand saw if you’re good with a handsaw) before you glue the lam top to the bottom wood. I’m assuming you’ll be using something like rosewood for the black keys; you can make the grain on those go the correct way for strength. For the white keys with cross grain, which will be quite weak, I would cut a dado on the bottom side of each key (by hand or router, or both) and glue in pieces with grain going the opposite way, to make those cross-grain white keys tough as hell. Keep in mind, you want to do all that BEFORE you cut the keys out, so you’re dadoing out of a solid top.