Project Overview
The design is for a steel body spider bridge resonator guitar, set up to be played like a regular guitar (ie, not dobro style). I don't have much interest in slide. I play fingerstyle so getting enough brightness is always a challenge - this is what prompted both the steel body and the spider bridge. I included a P-90 pickup in the design partly because I am interested in the idea of mixing acoustic and electric tones from the same instrument and partly because it provided a handy way to access the truss rod adjuster.
I started the design in SolidWorks. I borrowed the basic dimensions from a StewMac build blog (this was however a biscuit bridge wooden body resonator).
Update January 2024
The project has been stalled for a while, partly because of other projects taking priority (like fixing the clothes dryer, new brakes on my wife's car, etc) and partly because I am not sure about some of my next steps.
The body is 99% complete, which usually means there is still another 99% of the work left to be done. This is mostly satisfactory but I do need to solve an "oil can" problem around the pickup hole. "Oil can" is when there is a little too much metal in the area and it either wants to pop down or pop up but doesn't want to sit flat. It's a common problem in metal working and there are a number of possible fixes.
I have improved my metal working skills quite a bit since starting this and there are a number of things I'd do differently for the hypothetical next time around, but my idea is to go ahead and finish this one because I'm sure there will be more lessons to learn. One thing I would certainly do differently is drop the cutout. It added a lot of complexity to the metal forming and I doubt it will be worth the hassle.
Ideally I'd like a steel body resonator to be nickel plated and polished, but that would show up the flaws like crazy. Maybe for hypothetical guitar #2 or #3. For this one I plan to use a distressed copper finish like the picture above. I have the chemicals to do this. It's a multi stage process and I think there is a lot of "feel" in how you do it.
This is the first time I've made a neck. For previous guitar projects I've bought the necks from Warmouth. One of the current holdups is that I am unsure of the order of operations for finishing the neck.
The notch in neck stick toward the lower left of the picture worries me. I thought I needed this to be able to get the neck in to the body but later realized I could have made the hole in the body bigger without causing any problems. I am wondering if I need to reinforce this somehow. The wood is maple and it's an inch thick so it should be pretty strong, but the sharp corner there looks like a stress concentration point to my not-really-an-engineer mind.
I am really unsure about the order of operations for finishing the neck. Once the fingerboard is glued on, it will be a large unwanted job to remove it and the neck can't be removed from the guitar with the fingerboard in place.
I ordered this fingerboard from luthier supply (so I guess I can't really say it's a scratch-built neck). I have precut and pre-rounded frets and a dolly to install them. My idea was to adapt the dolly so it can go in my drill press and use the drill press to press them in.
The fingerboard needs to be trimmed to fit the neck but I can't figure out how to do that without the entire guitar assembled because I need to get the fingerboard located just right for intonation. My tentative idea is to put the neck in the guitar and mount the cone and bridge, then locate the first fret in reference to the bridge, and then mark the fingerboard for trimming.
Relevant (or maybe not) Personal Background
I played violin as a little kid and guitar as a teenager, then didn't play music at all for 30+ years. My son's piano lessons got me re-inspired to pick up the guitar again. As a kid, my mother was active in the bluegrass music scene and worked in a music store / luthiery shop (current incarnation: Steve Mason Luthiers in Lawrence KS). My father is in the racing business and I played in the shop with machine tools and welding over the years. I've been an inveterate DIY builder of everything all along - whenever I got in to anything my first thought was to make my own gear.
As I picked up the guitar again of course I had to make my own gear. So I made three partscasters, one tube amp from a kit, another tube amp from scratch, and a ReVibe (tube driven reverb plus tube driven harmonic tremolo). My playing still isn't great, probably because I always have a lot of other projects going on and partly because, in atonement for not listening to my excellent teenage guitar teacher who was always trying to get me to do finger picking or hybrid picking, I've mostly focused on learning fingerstyle skills more so than actually performing songs.
All of this is pure hobbyist level. My day job is in health care.