Body Form

At this point I have the Mahogany back and side sets on their way so I decided to build a body form for assembling the body.

Building the form was pretty straight forward. I used 1/2" MDF and 3/4" dowels. I started by tracing my half pattern of the guitars shape onto a piece of MDF and used that as the master. For each additional piece, I traced the master and drilled the corresponding holes for the dowels. Next, I cut the tracing close to the drawn line and attached this new piece to the master and used a pattern tracing bit in a router to clean up each new piece so that it matched the master each time. Once I had the 6 matching pieces, I stacked 3 on each side using scrap 3/4 plywood pieces as spacers and inserted the dowels with glue.

I've joined the two halves by glueing in a couple of 3/4" plywood blocks. Some builders prefer to keep the form in two pieces that can be split but I'm building this one as a one-piece form. The guitars body can be removed easily without having a form that hinges open and the one-piece will be stronger and more rigid.

Why the red MDF? Just happened that the scrap MDF I had around was painted red in a former life...