Very excited. My son’s 12 (turning 13 in a few months) and only recently started to be interested in the classical guitar we got for him a few years back. One of the strings started to fray on it so I let him use my Strat and now he’s dead set on saving his money up to buy his own electric.
I went into my local guitar store to buy strings for the classical guitar and was talking with the owner about it. He said to bring him in and he’d do a “fitting” to help him figure out what he’d like once he gets the money saved up. I’m super excited to in with him and explore. I remember being a little older than him and looking at guitars in store in complete and total amazement and awe and it’s going to be fun to do it all again through his eyes. I’m also very curious to see what he gravitates towards. I was showing him pictures of different styles and I got the impression he likes my Strat, but he also seemed interested in Teles and offsets like Jaguars and Mustangs. He wasn’t so keen on Les Pauls or 335-style guitars.
He’s really taken to guitar. His school has a big eighth-grade project he has to do where he has to either make or build something, or acquire a new skill, and then present it at the end of the year before he graduates. He has to talk through how he approaches different problems with it and explain everything to his teacher and class. His idea now is that he wants to build his own guitar. I need to talk to his teacher and see what counts as “building” as I think doing his own body and neck from scratch might be a bit much (plus we don’t have access to those kinds of tools) but maybe a partscaster would be suitable. He could talk about different styles of electric guitars and pickups and maybe even get into the tonewood debate 
. And while crafting a neck might be a bit much, I think he might be able to learn how to solder (and it’d give me a good reason to get good at that myself in case he needs help).
Hopefully he sticks with it for a while. I am trying my best to not push him too much and let him explore and find his own way, but I imagine my enthusiasm is pretty obvious at times.
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Kudos to you for supporting your son’s interests. My wife and I had to be the ones to support our nephew’s interest music because his parents certainly weren’t doing much of it.
Sounds like a really cool project! I kinda wish I had been prodded to make something in school. Outside of a few trades-specific classes and art classes, that was never really thrown out there.
You might be surprised what is available in your community. In my city (fewer than 100,000 people, so a smallish city), there’s a tool library where you can rent a lot of stuff. I definitely used that resource for my guitar build. I didn’t learn until much later, but there’s also a community center with a woodshop. It has bigger tools like table saws, drill presses, planers, band saws, and even a lathe. It’s smart to bring your own drill bits and such, but I’ve been using that as of late. I just wish I had known it was there much sooner. The band saw and drill press, in particular, would have saved me time and some errors.
Still, I’ve been working on this thing since September and I still have a good bit to go with the finishing. From a time standpoint, I’d recommend against something completely from scratch if he has a deadline. If he decides he wants to do another after this and it can take as long as it needs to take, then go big.
I would suggest taking a look at the various kits out there. You can get them in MANY different stages of completion, ranging from kits that are already “finished” but only need assembly (and the electrical bits all plug into each other, so little to no soldering needed) and setup to kits where they give you a pile of raw parts and the plans and templates to do very nearly everything. Something in the middle would let him work with wood a little bit - at least with sanding and finishing work, without a significant need for tools you don’t have.
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That’s part of my thinking. Start with a a kit and if he gets the bug to take the next step we’ll figure it out. I am by no means a luthier—I still have trouble just setting up my guitars—and while I’ve used a few power tools I’m definitely not comfortable enough with them to teach someone else how to use them. We do have a community woodshop which is really cool—I’ve done a couple of beginner classes there—but there’s a long leap from making a cutting board and a guitar!
I think we’ll look for a decent quality kit that includes the neck and body but he will be take on sanding, finishing, and the electronics.
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you can just a lot of hand tools instead, but some of that will take a LONG time if you’re using hand tools instead of power tools.
so comfort with power tools is pretty important. Learning/teaching your son to be comfortable with them will stay with him his whole life so I strongly recommend it. One of the great things my dad did for me. No, I don’t use them as a regular part of work most of the time (but I have at times). Instead, it’s hobbies and projects around the house.
awesome that you’ve found your community woodshop and have taken classes there.
believe it or not, the leap from cutting board to guitar isn’t THAT big. If you build the body out of multiple pieces of wood (cheaper, and in some respects easier to make many cavities), you’ll use all of the techniques you used for the cutting board to join the various bits. For me, cutting the various cavities (pickup cavities, control cavities, neck pocket, and so on) was the most nerve-wracking. I made some mistakes in the process. Most of which I also managed to repair. And most of the ones I couldn’t repair won’t be visible in the end, anyway.
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