For Christmas 2014, Robert and Elizabeth bought Bdale a beginner's guitar
book, and Robert offered to help with a guitar build project based on the
success of his Telecaster build. This is the resulting project, Bdale's
-first guitar, started in February of 2015!
+first guitar, started in February and completed in December of 2015!
After a lot of reading and listening, a few core decisions got things rolling:
* build a "clone" of a hard-tail Fender Stratocaster (no tremolo)
* body and neck to be near-natural wood color with satin finish
-* no pickguard (maximum exposed wood grain, rear control cavities
+* no pickguard (maximum exposed wood grain, rear control cavities)
* pickups and all hardware in black
* standard strat-like 3-pickup, 1 volume, 2 tone design with 5-way selector
* second tone control with push-pull switch to phase-reverse middle pickup
[Guitar Fetish](http://www.guitarfetish.com/), with the exception of a nicer
[hard-tail bridge](http://guitarheads.net/products/bridges/hardtailrear.html)
sourced from [GuitarHeads.Net](http://guitarheads.net), and a 22-fret natural
-Canadian maple neck purchased from eBay seller "bluelink88".
+Canadian maple neck purchased from eBay seller "bluelink88", and black machine
+screws in several sizes sourced from Amazon.
## Purchased Items ##
sub-assemblies oriented correctly relative to each other. Since Alibre has
been replaced by Geomagic Design, I pulled down a 15-day trial version of
that package to one of the Windows machines in the house, and (not
-surprisingly)it was able to read the file just fine.
+surprisingly) it was able to read the file just fine. I was then able to
+export just the body and read that into FreeCAD, which was used for the
+remainder of the design work.
Another interesting STEP file of the body from a 1962 strat drawn by Marc
Erasmus is available on [GrabCAD](https://grabcad.com/library/62-strat-asm)
and it appears at least one person has actually built a guitar using these
files.
-To build the guitar body I want, the existing body design file needs to be
+To build the guitar body I want, the existing body design file was
modified to eliminate the tremolo cut-out and rear cavity, to add screw holes
for the hard-tail bridge, and to shift the electronics cavity from being
front-open to being rear-accessible with the front just having 3 holes for
the volume and tone control shafts and the slot and mounting screw holes
needed for the pickup selector switch.
+The first attempt to cut the body on our CNC router failed, because a large
+delivery of building materials happened in the middle of the roughing pass,
+and I naively thought the router would be ok cutting for a while without
+me. Apparently, swarf jammed the bit up enough to cause the machine to lose
+steps and shut itself down. Unfortunately, when I attempted to restart the
+cut, something went horribly wrong and the roughing cutter put a deep gouge
+through much of the body of the guitar. I decided to call this attempt a
+bust, and look for more wood to start over with.
+
## Wiring ##
A standard strat has a volume control, 2 tone controls, and a 5-way pickup
projects / web / gag.com / blobdiff