Hi-tech neck

I've been going back and forth on what to do about the neck. I have one partly made, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with the peg-head. After debating with myself for a number of days, I decided to just build a new neck and save the other one for another day.

I cut and glued up a scarf-joint a couple of days ago, and trimmed the neck to near the final length. Today I routed slots for the truss rod and two carbon fiber rods. You can see that the CF rods extend up through the peg-head. The rods have a 15-degree taper on one end to match the angle of the headstock. The idea of the CF rods is to make the neck very stiff and add reinforcement to the scarf joint.


The next step is to glue some 'ears' on to the peg-head. I used the cut-off from the neck blank so the color and grain will be a close match. I cut the piece in half and glued the pieces on each side of the peg-head.

I have been using Smith's All-wood epoxy from LMI for the neck joints. Its probably not too important for these little joints, but has been recommended by those-who-know for gluing the fingerboard onto the neck. The idea is to avoid introducing the extra moisture in regular glue into the well-seasoned neck wood and possibly causing a warp or twist. The shop was pretty hot, so the epoxy hardened in a little more than an hour. I removed the clamps and brought the neck in the house where I'll let it continue to harden until tomorrow and then sand off the squeeze-out.