Building a body

The instrument creation continues!

When we last checked in we had just finished taking apart the keyboard and doing some minor soldering. The next step on our list is to build the body of our instrument.

As a base I'll be starting with two cheap Fender Starcaster bodies these are the guitars they sell at Target. I picked them up on ebay for $15 a piece.



The top 1/3 of one body is going to serve as keytar portion which will sit on the top of the instrument and the bottom 3/4ths of the other body will be the guitar portion. I measured out the height of keyboard and marked the body.


Cutting a straight line with the table saw was going to be difficult because of the non-straight edge of the guitar. In order to make it straight, I put together a few pieces of scrap wood to even the side out and keep it flush to the gate.



Since one of the sides of the body was going to be a throw away piece I attached it to the scrap wood with a short screw, making sure that the screw was not long enough to be in the path of the blade!



Once that was done it was time to fire up the table saw, cut and repeat for the second body.




With the two bodies cut the next step was to get them attached together. In order to have the most stability I figured that dowels were the way to go. Using a drill and a place marker i drilled for a total of 10 dowels, probably overkill, but I don't want to take any unnecessary risks.




Finally using a guide mark the spots on the other side of the body, apply the glue and clamp it together!







Because I just eyeballed the angles of the dowels getting the sides together with those clamps took a lot of work, but after a lot of effort the two bodies were clamped together, and there was only one step left for the evening: