MikeM wrote
Reason I was asking is that mahogany/sapele has interleaved grain as opposed to staight and am not sure how that affects tooling.
Hand planing becomes quite a bit harder because you no longer have a 'right' direction: both ways can create 'biting' blades. Tear-outs are small. Routing is much less of a problem and this is much more important in guitar building. Sanding is also easier than Ash since the grain in Ash has a tendency to sand off more in the 'flames' and to be harder between them. All in all, I recommend Sapeli over Ash over Maple.
breuban wrote
In what form do you usually buy the wood? Planks? Would you then have to glue the planks together to make it thicker or wider?
The easiest to come by is 2" thick (50mm) or a little less, by 120mm - 190mm wide. You usually get it cut to length and you should probably have them plane it to 47mm to get some flat faces to start off with. For Strats, Teles etcetera you join the body halves in the middle which requires a straight, flat and square face you should rout, really. For your V shape I think you can get away with only glueing on the extremes of the V. There was a thread one or two weeks back with lotsa pictures on an asymmetric V build.
You can also get 1" but i would not recommend that. It looks easier since you can reach the shape you describe by putting two halves on top of each other, but it will be very hard to glue properly. You will need flat and straight faces both sides and a moer of a lot of pressure to push out the glue. It's not worth it and you are likely to end up with a much less resonant body. Sure, Gibson put 12mm Maple onto 50mm Mahogany, but they don't work in a shed.
My tip would be to buy some wood before you change your mind and then to put it on the shelf. While the wood takes a year to cure, you buy yourself some books and read up. Not even 20% of what you want to know about guitar building is on the Net.
