I had written a lengthy post and attached a couple of pics, then submitted the post and then it disappeared. So here are the pics, I'll re-write the story.
I have wanted to do this for quite a while. I have seen some of the work some of the people here have done and thought I'd love to do a project like one of there myself. Work got really slow during Q4 2009 and I had lots of time on my hands.
I visited a cabinetmaker friend of mine to scrounge some wood for my project. I was in luck that day.
There is a local man, who is the grandfather of a well known lead singer of a successful rock band from my home town. This man builds fine musical instruments, mostly by hand, but occasionally he uses some of the equipment in my friends cabinet shop. This man had traded these two pieces of Rock Maple, for some soft maple that would be easier for him to work with. These two boards were very hard and they had a twist to them that would make planing them impossible. For me they were perfect.
I actually traded out some work for them and a board of soft maple to make the body and neck. The work I did was to re-build a Craftsman Shaper table that had been sitting in the back of his shop for years because of a nasty whining sound. After I replaced the two bearings on the shaper shaft, I discovered that the motor was the problem. The peices of sheet metal and felt packing material that Sears called bearings wasn't designed for continuous duty, so I replaced them with sealed roller bearings.
He got a working shaper table, got my project materials. And Away we go.............