As an avid guitarist for over 13 years and member of Stanford’s Jazz Combo, I’ve always dreamed about constructing my own guitar. I began this build for an open ended project during a music physics course, though it rapidly outgrew the scope of the class. The project started as 3 rough sawn chunks of elm wood, that I sourced from blown down trees at my grandparents house in Lousiana after Hurricane Laura. I used a neck from an old guitar I had back home that I used to learn to modify guitar electronics and wiring harnesses.

I first started by hand planing the planks until flat, and proceeded to glue and clamp them. I then recreated the geometries of my a vintage 1950s guitar style I had always wanted, but could never afford.

While the glue was drying, I laser cut a plastic routing template from my CAD mockup, and traced it onto the board.

Once it was dry, I sketched the rough shape and used a band saw to cut the plank to the rough shape of the guitar, and then cleaned up the edges with a router.

Then came the hardest part, the interior routing. I laser cut another template for interior routes, and used a hand router to remove the material. I used test cuts and tolerances to establish how much material the router would take off with relation to the template, and used that to precisely cut the neck pocket (where the guitar neck attaches to the body) to a friction fit. At this point, I didn't have the patience to sit and wait until the body had already been stained and finished to play it, so I screwed down the hardware and soldered in some leftover pickups that were sitting around in the music research building.

Finally, I sanded down the body, stained it, and applied a vintage nitrocellulose lacquer to the body, the same finish that was applied on the original 1950s electric guitars. Some people say that this particular lacquer has an unnatural ability to let the instrument "breathe" and resonate more, though as an engineer I remain a little doubtful about the veracity of these claims. Nevertheless, the guitar sounds great, and I still play it almost every day.