Had a family of good friends come and visit recently. The 11-year-old daughter has been learning ukulele, and and was noodling around on some of the instruments I have kicking around here. I asked if she would like to make herself a slide guitar. She jumped at the chance, and the best part was how much she wanted to do the work herself. I had a scrap of red oak from some old church pews kicking around that was too small to use for a neck unless it was a two string instrument, which was fine with her. Here she is working, first at the band saw:
Then we drilled out the head stock and joined the drill holes with a coping saw. She flattened out the rough cut with a rasp:
After that it was on to shaping the neck, first with a spoke shave and then with rasps and finally sand paper :
She wanted the sound hole in the shape of a heart, so she drilled two holes and we joined them with the coping saw.
All in all it was a fun couple of hours, and she got to use a bunch of tools (under close supervision, never fear), and she went home with an instrument that she made. Pretty cool. We strung it up with three strings and tuned them to C G C. Sounds pretty good:
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