For the body wood, I am out of pocket about $2, since the plywood was free. I really love this style of construction, it is much less expensive and much faster and easier than solid wood. The final finish will be clear poly – “PlywoodGlo” I call it, with “PineGlo” sides. Most of the body openings are done now, including the battery box, I just need to route some depressions for the bridge and pickups. That’s probably not the right order to do things, but I’m pretty good at improvising. Later, I watched some instructional videos, and found that what seemed like the right way to me turned out be just that. I just winged it and did what made sense. This is my first attempt at binding, and it came out good enough to keep. I wouldn’t want an all-pine body, as soft pine would be easily dinged and damaged, but with a hard plywood top and back, the pine is only exposed at the sides. With a body thickness of only 1-1/2″, the only other way to attach the neck would be to glue it in. From the front, it will look like a set neck. This allows for removal and shimming, which is the proper way to adjust neck angle, not by the truss rod. The neck heel will sit more-or-less flush with the back. Wood is the original composite material from mother nature, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it a bit. I also soaked the corners and the area around the nuts with CA (Crazy) glue, which will soak in and harden the pine. Pine is strong but neither hard nor durable, and I wasn’t going to trust it to hold neck screws instead, there are T-nuts sandwiched between the core and front, and the neck will attach with 10-24 SS bolts, not screws. The first picture shows the back being glued on, the second picture is of the back, with my novel bolt-on neck pocket. The top and back are pre-finished 1/4″ maple plywood, nice hard material, with a starter layer of poly already on. Pine is such wonderful easy stuff to work with. Roughed-out the outlines on the bandsaw, the chambers on the scroll saw and cleaned it all up on the spindle sander. The result was slightly cupped, I sanded it flat with no significant loss of thickness. That’s wide enough for just about anything – no shaving dimensions for this project. Cut two pieces, glue them edge to edge, and you have a blank 15″ across, and 1 inch thick.
Lowes sells these up to 8″ nominal width. The body core is 5/4″ pine finished lumber.