If you think you can save money doing it yourself, keep dreaming. This is like a disease, it takes over your very soul (if you even have one to begin with), and devours your every waking minute.
Once you start down the path of lutherie, forever will it dominate your destiny.
Eh hem. Excuse me. I have been watching the new Star Wars DVD's.
Yes I build guitars, and in fact it is one of my professions. I say one of because it is a really shitty way to make a living.
There are lots of good resources for building acoustics, and far fewer about electrics, on the web. However, your best bet is to buy some books, and read them. They will give you the most in depth and reliable information.
THIS is a good book, though I am not wild about his design sense. But of course, he is teaching you how to design and build, so your end product is from your design sense. So it is up to you if your guitar is butt ugly.
I haven't actually read any other books on building electric guitars, but what I would recommend is that you at least get started by building a kit guitar. It will help you a great deal in learning some of the basic things you need to know in order to build your first guitar from scratch. A lot of builders have started this way.
All of the sites recommended so far are good, but I would also like to add
KATHY MATSUSHITA'S SITE. She is an amateur luthier who has done some excellent work, and has an excellent site. It is geared a little more towards acoustic instruments, but she has built an electric, and many of the skills are the same.
I was serious, though, that this is not a way to save money. I have heard lutherie described as the process of acquiring and using clamps, and it is true in so far as it goes. It is, however, missing something. Sure, we probably have about 1000 clamps around the shop (I have never actually counted), but we are also constantly buying new tools of all sorts. All builders do. It is inevitable, and tools are expensive.
Also, do not think that you will be completely happy with your first instrument; people never are. The most common problems are an inability to create a fair curve for the body shape, which just looks bad, and shaping a neck. I have almost never seen a person build a first guitar which had a comfortable neck. They are almost always bulky and oddly shaped. Not big, mind you (which some people like) but bulky. They are not shaped right. It is just a matter of taking off more wood, but people either get nervous about taking off too much, or they get tired (particularly if they try to make a maple neck), and stop.
Do not get me wrong. I am not trying to sound discouraging, as I think building guitars is great fun, a wonderful hobby, and I would absolutely encourage you to do it. But do it for those reasons, and not to save money, or because you think your first guitar is going to be the greatest in the world. It is not. They never are (even my first one has problems, and I built it under the direct supervision of one of the worlds greatest builders, my dad).
So build it, and have fun, and then build another one. Somewhere around ten or fifteen, you might even know what you are doing.
Light
"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
