I had nothing in the way of an evening social life, so the nights when I didn't work in the dining hall were spent in the wood shop. As a result, I finished the table early. So I completed the baseball bat that Uncle Ted and I had started during the previous summer. Then, with two weeks left before the end of the semester, I bought a length of 8/4 ash and began roughing out a guitar body based on elements of the Jazz Bass and Telecaster designs.
And that's about as far as I got until August. Having graduated, I no longer needed to save money for school, so I bought a guitar neck (birdseye maple with ebony fingerboard) and pickups (Seymour Duncan '59 nickle-cover humbuckers) from Warmoth and I got all the hardware from Stewart-MacDonald. I decided to buy a completed, professionally manufactured neck rather than try to tackle the precise process of cutting fret slots. I spent around 400 dollars on the entire thing and miraculously, it played and sounded great!