Plywood telecaster
Description
The body of this guitar was entirely made by me combining 7 layers of laser-cut plywood. Afterward, I etched in the signatures of my friends and coworkers, added a finish, and rigged the guitar with pickups and all the proper hardware.
For anyone else curious about making something similar, I have attached the original CAD and the pdf vectors I made for the 7 layers of 1/4″ plywood I cut!
Telecaster Full File Repository
Finished Guitar
This guitar is 100% playable and is currently put on display at the front of the Texas Inventionworks (TIW). The main purpose of the guitar is to show students that even with limited tools (IE: scrap plywood), creative engineering can be used to make the most out of little!
The Hardware
The majority of the hardware (pickups, bolts, plates, etc) was acquired online at discount stores. And to be even scrappier, I found a vendor that buys out entire warehouses of guitar parts and sells them at a steep clearance. This led to the neck costing ~$20!
Body Assembly
After being laser cut, I aligned the layers of plywood, drilled holes into them as one assembly, and then connected them to a peg board to keep them straight while being glued together. The layered silhouette of the telecaster left space on the interior for the electronics.
CAD & Inspiration
This entire project was inspired by an open-source CAD model I found online of a 1:1 Fender Telecaster. I took the model, removed all the extraneous features, and then sliced the body into 7 layers in SolidWorks. I created drawings out of each layer and exported them as PDFs. Our laser cutter recognized these as vector files and then cut out the plywood as outlines of each layer of the guitar.
