In this three-part series from Amy Qian she designs and builds a ban-tar guitar body, fretboard, soundboard, and assembles it all together. In doing so, there’s lots of great step-by-step photos and tips & tricks for other adventures in making. The finished guitar looks great and I look forward to hearing an audio clip of it in action 🙂

My first homemade guitar had three main objectives: learn how to make a fretboard, learn how to install a truss rod, finish as soon as possible. So this post is about that first goal.

The body of this guitar body is fairly unconventional because I was too lazy to make all the jigs for bending the sides this time around. This effort was pretty focused on just learning about truss rods and fretboards. I started this stage the same way I start a lot of projects these days – plane a bunch of scrap wood to size (this time maple) and glue them together, usually using far too few clamps. I keep meaning to fix that…

Previous posts were about making the fretboard and making the body. Next I worked on the soundboard, which used leftover material from the spruce soundboard I originally bought for my gourd ukulele. The X-brace is made from what I’m pretty sure is mahogany and the sound hole brace, probably unnecessary but gives it a nice finish, is made from maple.

Here are the three parts:

making a guitar fretboard

making the ban-tar guitar body

soundboard and assembly of the ban-tar