Plywood ~ Luthiery Laboratories

Plywood

Cabinet-grade plywoods are ideal for guitar faces. Maple, birch, oak, and many other woods are available from your local home supplies store. For hollow-body faces, 1/4" plywood or thinner is used. When using plywood for faces, you must take care not to sand through the surface ply.

Plywood can also be used for body sides, as shown above. For this use, any grade of plywood will do, my favorite is dumpster plywood. Two 3/4" or 5/8" pieces plus thin faces makes a reasonable thickness for a guitar body.

Used this way, plywood exposes a very rough surface at the sides. This can be filled with Bondo or other two-part wood filler and sanded smooth. However, it is likely that the grain will 'pull through' the finish eventually, resulting in a slight checking or dimpling. Another alternative is Tolex side binding.

Plywood is very strong, hard, and heavy. You can cut shapes from plywood that would probably break along the grain if it was real wood. However, plywood is too heavy to build a full-thickness solid body from, it is best used for chambered bodies as shown above.

Some all-plywood body projects:

Woods etc

Here at Luthiery Labs, we're only interested in woods that are reasonably priced and locally available.

Wood Notes:

Since the gubment made rosewood illegal, ** despite the fact that there is no real definition of what rosewood is, alternative fretboard woods are going to become more mainstream in loothery. Bubinga is also illegal now, but that's no great loss.

** For a while, no longer

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Building Bodies

My take on bodies

An electric guitar body serves several purposes. It provides a place to attach (and hide) hardware and electronics, and provides a counterweight for the neck, specifically the tuners out there at the end. It also provides enough weight and bulk to stabilize the instrument while it is played, either sitting or standing, while at the same time being not too heavy or interfering with natural playing motions and access to the strings. And needless to say, it must be strong enough to resist the effects of string tension, which can be 100-200 pounds or more.

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Comments on Plywood

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Sharp Fret Ends

I took this 'Bird down from it's usual place up on the wall to take some measurements, and I noticed that it had grown fangs along the ( otherwise excellent Mighty-Mite ) neck that were not there before. Sharp fret ends is something I see people piss and moan about all the time. It is going to happen. It's not that the frets weren't dressed properly at the factory, the problem is that most guitars are made in warm humid places like China, Mexico, Indonesia, and Tennessee in the summer. Wood swells with moisture. When they are brought to the USA and placed in a dry heated winter house, the wood dries and shrinks a tiny bit, and the fret ends protrude. Everything about fretwork is a matter of thousandths of an inch, even the tiniest discrepancies are obvious. So this is not a defect, it is something that is simply going to happen, and it is easy to fix.

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