You need a block of wood to shape the instrument body from. You’ll need decks to be able to create this body blank. If you aren’t surrounded by a community of skaters and have not collected a ton of boards beforehand, it may be difficult to acquire them quickly.

Before you can start working with your skatewood, you need to get rid of all material that seals the wooden surface of each deck. That means getting rid of the griptape, any left over glue, graphics, stickers and coating.

Trim the treated decks, such that they can be pressed and glued together more easily. Cut all excess wood, which is large enough and left after trimming, into 1.5cm wide slices. Leftover bits and saw dust can be collected for various purposes.

Stack and glue several deck planks to create a solid skate wood sandwich by using a lot of force. You don’t have a hydraulic press? No problem. Simply build a mighty, steezy-squeezy contraption with little effort and even on a tight budget.

Once you’ve kept the stacks of decks in the press for a day, you can release them from captivity. Now, planarize the resulting sandwich and, voilà, here is your psychedelic wood plank.

Build a mold to layout your design and pour a bunch of epoxy resin over it. Once the result sets, it’ll be tough as a rock and clear like water. At least that’s the theory.

You should handle epoxy with care. Even with most things considered, you may just end up in a dark basement fighting bubbles with fire.

A slam will force you to think about getting up and best case it’ll teach you how to roll away on your next attempt. You can quite literally roll away from a sketchy epoxy trick using a router!

With all layers ready, compose them into one last sandwich with a liberal amount of glue in between. Under a lot of pressure, let it cure for a day.

Draw, saw and route along the outlines of a guitar body template. Just make sure the width of whatever model you choose fits your body blank, duh…

Carve an arm- or chestrest into your guitar body using a fan grinder. The layers of color you dig through will tell you stories. Uncover them and get carried away!

Neck, pickups, bridge, hardware, electronics, you’ll have to make some tough choices. Study your options and align them with your aspired sound, visual concept and crafting skill.

Shape a tightly fitting neck pocket for maximized resonance of sound between neck and body. Define alignment of the vertical axis and establish the neck position to measure the scale for your guitar.

Attach neck and body. Then thread some fake strings onto your soon-to-be guitar and carefully measure the scale from nut to saddle. Now mark the placement for your bridge.

Depending on the type of bridge you buy, you may have to quickly drill 6 holes through your body and attach string ferrules. NO, DON’T ATTEMPT TO DO IT QUICKLY! Do it properly and unlike me…

On a side note: Several online shops sell routing templates for most common guitar parts. But it is fairly easy to make them yourself - even without a CNC milling machine.

Align and fix your templates to the body and carve a smooth couple of routes to create the remaining pockets. Don’t enjoy the results of your work too much, the wood you uncover will be filled with hardware anyway - a small price to pay.

Finalize the body sculting process by digging some tunnels. This includes both a socket for the input jack as well as channels to run wires towards the control cavity.

Don’t rush into implementing your design. After finishing the body, it’ll be the perfect time to take a step back and evaluate options for a custom headstock shape and hardware color accents.

As the name already hints at, the headstock can be considered the face of a guitar. Once the body is dressed, go ahead and model it. While you’re at it, why not embed a sheet of skatewood for good measure?