Formicaster: The Body
| The body is hollow, made of high-pressure laminate. The sides are heat-bent, and attach to a central frame consisting of a neck block, a tail block, and two longitudinal ribs, just wider than the pickups. Later, a bridge block will go between the ribs. The cutaway-side rib is cut out to allow electronics to pass through from the center to the side chamber. |  |
| Here I'm clamping the kerfing in place, using my treasured collection of 1950s-era aluminum clothespins. |  |
| If you ever needed a convincing argument for a floor-standing drill press, this is one. The angle bracket of 1/2 inch aluminum plate makes it easy to clamp long objects vertically. If you did this on a benchtop drill press, you'd have to hang everything off the edge of the workbench, ensuring that the base was bolted or clamped to the bench, lest the whole thing fall over. |  |
| Trimming the edges was easy with a
flush-trim bit in the router table, but getting the roundover that feels
right for a guitar was a full evening of filing with double-cut plastics
files and smoothing with a couple of grades of sandpaper. HPL is a mixed blessing to work with. You don't have to protect the body from nicks and dings on the workbench, but if you go through the melamine surface, you've had it. There's no such thing as sanding a gouge back to level. There were several times when I felt that it would have been easier to build in wood. The finishing schedule is rather nice, though: Wipe with a clean, damp cloth. |
 |