Elikeatts wrote: I'm planning to build a ground-up electric guitar for my personal use both as a learning experience and to use it as my main guitar. I'm a fairly advanced guitarist and I plan for the guitar I build to be top-notch, high quality, and very custom to my style of playing. I'm planning to make it a custom strat-esque guitar intended for hard rock. My style is somewhat technical and requires a faster neck and I use a lot of tremolo. To make it easy, I'll just state that it will be similar to a van halen type guitar with a floyd rose, humbuckers, fast neck etc... But my style is more eclectic than that and I wanted it to be able to sound good in other styles as well.
Although it is certainly possible to build a very good guitar your first time, even a top notch one, it isn´t a guarantee. There is a learning curve, and your second, third, fourth guitars will be better than your first. Setup is key to getting a guitar playing really well, and is a skill in and of itself. If you are building a bolt on, getting neck angle right on is going to be easier than if you are doing a set neck or neck through your first time.
If you just want that one guitar, commission it from a good custom builder. It will almost certainly be cheaper and result in a better instrument.
If you want the learning experience, by all means build. Just don´t kid yourself you will save yourself any cash. I think I may verge into ´break even´ territory (paying myself nothing at all for labour) by the time I reach guitar 30 or so, given the investment I´ve made in tooling and materials. Admittedly, you don´t need a massive initial outlay and can make do with a fairly limited set of tools (there have been discussions on this in the past, a search should turn them up), but the right equipment does make the experience as a whole significantly more pleasant. The cash I´ve spent, I could own a Traugott, a Ryan and a couple of other nice custom built high-end acoustics and a few fancy schmancy electrics. But I prefer rolling my own. Build because you want to build guitar is my advice, if you want that one dream guitar, have it built for you. I haven´t met many who have been able to leave it at just one guitar 
My favourite book is ´Make Your Own Electric Guitar´ by Melvyn Hiscock, which guides you through various styles step by step. In terms of what I consider essential tooling, you´re looking at a decent router, a decent rasp, a good jigsaw or access to a bandsaw for initial roughing out, lots of clamps, bottle of fresh titebond, a good straightedge (no, a ruler is not good enough if you want a dead on setup job), good quality sandpaper (I like 3M gold for hand sanding), a set of small files for detail work, access to a drill press for tuner and tremolo post holes. That´s off the top of my head, and the list can certainly get longer. Budget for materials largely depends on materials chosen - I wouldn´t buy wood from StewMac, mostly because it´s a tad overpriced, IMO.
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