Hey everyone it's Dylan from The Black Forest Wood Company, this week we're going to show
you how we use one of our silicone guitar molds to actually create a real functioning electric guitar
we do have these molds available for sale on our website so we'll leave a link down
in the description if any of you guys want to pick some up and try them for yourself
this particular mold is based on a fender telecaster body and one thing i'll mention
is that the body shape of the mold is the exact size of the finished body for the guitar
so you do have to make sure that your pieces of wood are cut tight to that outside edge
just so you get a nice finish shape when you're done this and eric here has decided to go with
kind of a light blue pigment for the resin so i believe he used our caribbean blue black forest
pigments and then of course he's using our black forest deep resin here and with our deep resin you
could do a pour like this two inches thick in a single shot with no worries of it overheating one
thing quite nice with these silicone molds as well is that they're a lot easier to release than the
other hdpe molds so they are a bit more expensive but you don't have to pound them right out
so what eric is doing here now is just surfacing both sides flat i think there was a couple low
spots on this too that he's going to end up refilling afterwards so he's jointing one face on
our powermatic jointer and then we're just sending it through our laguna planer to get the other side
nice and flat too and now what eric is doing is just doing the final routing on the outside shape
of the body so it's like i said earlier it's very close to the final size but when you pour it you
do actually kind of end up pushing out that mold a bit so there is a little bit left to route off
with the template so eric i believe just ordered this template from stumac this isn't sponsored
and he's using that just to get a perfect shape out of the guitar body just with the flush turn
bit on the router once he's got that all trimmed to size on the template he can then take this
over to the drill press and begin taking out some of the cavities for the actual electric
guitar hardware that's going to go in this body so after he roughed things out with the drill press
now he's taking another flush trim bit on a router just to make everything more clean
the the drill press is mostly just a an easy way to remove material so there's actually a
spot for the router bit to plunge into otherwise he'd have to make a plunge cut directly into the
material which would be a little bit sketchy so the drill press just makes it a bit easier
pull up
so then after the removal of the template eric's just getting his body all sanded up nicely here i
believe he's taking this up to 320 grit because this piece is going to get a spray finish from
jeko now he's using our supermax sander just to calibrate the exact thickness that's required for
a thickness sander i'll actually say these super max sanders are probably the best thickness sander
that you can get on a hobbyist level now he's just using our edge sander to take out any of the more
rough marks on the outside or anywhere that there was some epoxy left just to get everything nice
and clean before that spray finish goes on same kind of deal as the edge sander um but
we're using a spindle sander here this time and the reason being is that just allows eric
to actually get into some of these tighter curves that you can see here there would
be no way to really do that with the edge sander otherwise you'd kind of have to do it by hand so
we also have a bigger spindle we can put in there for some of the larger curves too
and here we're using some of our black forest super glue and epoxy so we're it's not released
yet but we are coming out with a line of super glues and five and ten minute i believe epoxies
mostly suited for repairs just like this so eric's just taking a syringe and filling in
a lot of those really small imperfections so he can get a nice even finish when this is done and
then similar to what eric was doing earlier he's just using a template from stumac to route out
some grooves for i believe this one's actually for where the neck is going to bolt on onto the body
and then eric's just drilling out for some of the wiring here and you'll notice the washer on
the drill bit that's actually kind of a nice tip that you can use to help yourself drill straight
if you're leaning too far forward the washer will fall into the body and then if you're
leaning too far back the washer will fall into the drill so you kind of just balance it there
in the middle and that gives you somewhat of an indication whether you're going straight or not
this is acting as a spring yeah pressure against it and then you raise it and then you raise
that's it so the higher you come see i i was worried that these were too deep because i
thought it'd just be kind of sitting on the base but that way you can adjust your action based off
where your neck is sitting that's so you can raise these up raise your pickup to get proper sound
yeah and then if this is too high by like a 16 you can adjust it i guess the first thing
to do would be get all these routed out to the right depth and then drill some sketchy holes
so this part here is a little sketchy uh it's again another hole that's needed for wiring
and it's got to go all the way up to the neck and through most of the guitar body so there's
not really a good way to do this on a drill press so we've got an extra long drill bit that we've
bought we're being very careful and eric is slowly drilling this thing out trying not to come through
the top of his guitar so now eric is drilling out to actually attach the neck onto the body of the
guitar and i believe this neck he also ordered from stumac so it was a pre-fabricated neck
then once he's got everything aligned he can actually go ahead and screw this neck right on
there so i think it's i believe it's maple with an ebony strip down the middle is what
he ordered for this neck here now unfortunately jeko missed the filming of probably one of the
more satisfying parts of this process and that is the spray coating going on the body of this guitar
but if you've watched some of our other videos i'm sure you guys can kind of imagine what that
probably looked like and here is eric playing the finished product that he built all by himself
so
another thing that i should mention is if you're interested in learning how to build a guitar we do
offer a build your own acoustic guitar core so we don't yet have an electric
one but you can come in and spend 12 weeks with brad and build your own acoustic guitar
so i hope you guys enjoyed seeing the process of that guitar build that was actually eric one of
our our staff members who built that guitar for himself it's just going to be his personal guitar
and i did want to talk a little bit about all the different varieties of molds that we have
available so what eric used there was one of our silicone molds and we have those available
in quite a few different sizes so there's the unique shapes like the guitar we have a wine
bottle or like a charcuterie board with a handle there's one that's shaped like a skateboard here
and then we have some of our more standard shapes of silicone molds too so there's rectangular ones
round ones but then we have our hdpe form so those are a harder plastic and there's two
varieties that i want to i want you guys to be aware of so we have our actual plastic welded
forms which is like what you see right here and also what you see here with the oval form
then we have for some cost savings that are available are the one piece vacuum form molds
so these have no welds at all they're made from a single piece they're a little bit thinner plastic
and they do kind of bend a little bit easier but as long as you're clamping your pieces down
these molds still work totally fine and you do end up saving yourself a little bit of money by going
with this option so all of these are available on our website you guys can find them on there
we're also happy to answer any questions you might have about these in the comments down below
thank you guys for watching our video one thing i should talk about someone's probably going to ask
about my finger so i i did break my finger i was hiking and a water bottle fell on the tip of it
and i shattered the tip of my finger with a water bottle so
that's what happened to my finger not woodworking related just a
a stupid water bottle but thank you guys for watching and we'll see you next week