Attach
Now that the epoxy mosaic was ready, I could finally start to assemble the full body blank.
What you need
table saw
edge planer
wood glue
clamps
First, I trimmed the inward facing sides of the board stacks to gain a straight edge. As mentioned before, some of the decks had slipped off a bit while in the press. This meant having to take away more material to gain a straight edge. Additionally, the concavity of boards, which got intensified during the initial sanding, led me to cut off even more wood to ensure the side faces would have no cracks. Placing my Tele onto the two unprocessed stacks prior to trimming solidified the notion that I had a bunch of space left to play with. So I made two confident cuts using a table saw.
Unfortunately, I was still left with a small gap when horizontally aligning the trimmed planks. I could introduce force to close that gap, but fixing this arrangement using clamps left me with a slight V-shape. This would not be acceptable, because it prevents a secure attachment to the next layer in vertical order. Consequently, I visited Tischlerei Mitsching again. They were kind enough to enhance my work by routing the edge faces. This gave me two solid 90 degree cuts, which now aligned perfectly against each other.
Stacked Board Assembly
I added a liberal amount of wood glue in between the trimmed stacks and clamped the setup down for one night. (See Recycling Skateboards Into Guitars | How It’s Made @ 2:25)
On the next day, all layers were ready for attachment. Due to the fix for my epoxy mishap, I had lost several millimeters of thickness on the mosaic layer. To make up for that, I decided to add another sheet of plywood in the middle.
The Final Sandwich
Last, I created one final sandwich out of all layers, which was held together by a bunch of glue and then setup to rest in my DIY press.
Looking at the result definitely felt good! All prep work was done. Until that time, I had spent several days merely upcycling wood. While I had fun doing all of that, my actual goal felt kind of detached from the reality of the process. But next, I would be able to actually start making a guitar.
