Peg head trouble

Well, I messed up the headstock on what was turning out to be a really nice looking neck. The neck is being made out of some African mahagony, with a scarf joint at the peghead and a stacked heel. The fingerboard and headplate are going to be African ebony I bought from A.C. Woods. Unfortunately, I made two mistakes. The first was neglecting to measure the posts on my tuners carefully. I left the headstock just a little too thick. The second: I tried to get all fancy and put some of the flamed maple binding around the edge of the headstock. It just turned out terribly! I cut the peghead into a nice (I thought) shape, with a few curves. I attempted to bend the binding into the curves, and ended up cracking a piece while gluing it in.

Now I can fix the headstock thickness by taking some off the back of the peghead. The broken binding on the peghead just got worse when I tried to route it off with my dremel tool. I slipped and routed out a big gouge. Fortunately, the gouge was limited to the ebony headplate, so I took that off and started over.

















I removed the excess thickness from the peghead by sanding the back by hand. I also removed a little from the front since it was a little rough from removing the old headplate.

Here is a shot of the new headplate and the front of the peghead. I might be able to save this neck yet.



Now the new headplate was a little thicker than I wanted (~0.2 inch) so I sanded it down by hand to about 0.15 inch. The ebony dust was everywhere, but I had my gear on.









The day wasn't a total bust. I came up with a way to put a nice straight 15 degree angle on the front of the headplate where the nut will go. I put a piece of 220 grit PSA sandpaper on a little scrap of aluminum angle.



I clamped the headplate to the peghead, making sure it was overhanging the neck. I placed the angle with the abrasive on the neck and sanded down the front edge of the headplate. The result is a smooth, straight edge at just the right angle to the neck.




All thats left now is to glue the new headplate on and hope I can recover from this mess.





After the glue had dried for about 24 hours, I trimmed the headplate down to size. I used a scraper to get the edges flush with the peghead.






I had to be real careful re-drilling the holes for the tuners. Using my drill press, I drilled from the back of the peghead with the 0.250 bit, then turned it over and used the reamer from the front to make the hole wide enough for the ferrule.












So far, so good.