Thread: Joining Boards to Make a Body .... ?

Hi all,

I keep toying with the idea of making a solid-body electric of some description. All the boards I have generally are around 25mm or so thick, and around 150 wide, although some are up to 200 mm wide. I have various pieces of figured myrtle, figured blackwood and some new growth blackwood.

The nett result of all this is I'm thinking the recipe for the body could be something like -
Cap - bookmatched myrtle (this would be a 25mm myrtle re-sawed, so would be around 10 mm or so thick)
Centre - 2 pieces of blackwood, from one board, not bookmarked, but two lengths with one "slipped" down so it is beside the other, would be about 25 mm or so thick
Back - bookmatched blackwood (this would be a 25mm blackwood re-sawed, so would be around 10 mm or so thick)

My concern is, if you were looking at the end of this "sandwich" of timber, I would finish up with a center join in all three pieces lining up. Intuitively, I don't think this is a good idea. It seems to me it would be preferable that there was not a continuous join running through all the pieces. I suppose I could make the centre piece out of three lengths and not two, so the joints would then not align, but I don't know if that would start looking pretty ordinary.

The other alternative is not to bookmatch the top and back, so then there would only be two pieces ( cap and a back) but they would still have a join lining up between both, and I think it would look even worse not bookmatched.

Does anyone have any comments on this (other than, you dunno what you are doing so don't start ... )

Kind regards