... more neck work

Its been a long time since I sat down and wrote about the progress on this guitar. I haven't been a total slacker since the past post, I worked on the neck (and started another guitar!) over the last couple of months. In the last post, I rough-cut the neck angle while cutting the tenon. I will show some of the work I have done since then.


The first thing I did was trim some of the excess wood from the neck. A bandsaw would make this step a lot easier, but I make do with the tools I have. I really like Japanese saws for this kind of work. They have a thin blade, are super-sharp and cut when you pull the saw. That means the cuts are fast and easy to control.


With the neck a little closer to the final size, I glue in the carbon fiber (CF) rods using some medium viscosity super glue. A lot of builders use these to keep the neck straight over time. A fact of life is that guitar necks change shape over time under the tension of the strings. CF is light and super-stiff, making it a good material for reinforcing a thin guitar neck. I got mine from James Watts at Los Alamos Composites (http://www.jameswattsguitars.com/LAC.htm). This is my first neck with CF rods, and the process went smooth, requiring only a couple of extra steps and a little thought to the building sequence.

You can also see the fingerboard extension glued onto the end of the fingerboard. This piece acts as the second tenon for the "double mortice and tenon" style of neck attachment. It also keeps the fingerboard straight at the end.


Next, I glued the headplate onto the peg head. The CF rods extend under the headplate for a little extra stregth where the neck is the thinnest, so this step has to wait until the rods are glued in.



With the headplate on, I thinned the peghead to its final thickness. The tuners I plan to use for this guitar need a peghead thickness of a half inch.


I wanted to try to make a diamond shaped volute on the back of the peghead where it blends into the neck. I made a jig based on one made by Mark Pluta, an Austin - area luthier. It holds the neck and has a template for the volute shape. A laminate trimmer with a pattern bit does all the work.






The jig has a couple of quater-inch pins that fit in the truss rod slot. By referencing the jig to the truss-rod slot, I keep everything lined up on the center line of the neck.










I'm not too sure I like the shape of the volute, in retrospect I think I should have made it a little wider. The template is screwed onto the jig, so I can change it if I want to on the next guitar.


With the peghead thinned, I trimmed it down to the final shape. I used a template made from 1/4 inch MDF cut carefully to the final shape I want. The template is held in place with a couple of index pins made from some 1/16 inch finishing nails. I put a pattern cutting bit in the router, and route the peghead on the router table.


I didn't take any pictures of the fingerboard being glued on, but you can see it in the next shot. I put the frets in before gluing the neck on. Fretting the fingerboard is still one of the hardest parts of building a guitar for me. I think doing it with the fingerboard flat on the workbench made it just a little bit easier. One other note, I used Smith's All-Wood epoxy to glue the fingerboard to the neck. The epoxy doesn't contain any water that might cause the wood to swell or twist or otherwise change shape. The idea is to keep everything as flat as possible at this point to help with the final set-up later. After gluing it on and trimming the neck all the way down to the final width, I start shaping it.

I get the shape by trimming facets into the neck like Graham McDonald describes in his book. I start by marking facets along the neck and carefully removing wood with a spokeshave. I rough-cut the heel with a chisel at this point as well.









I will end this post with a shot of the back of the peghead. The volute was super easy to shape with this method. It came out much crisper than my first guitar. You can see the scarf joint glue line pretty clearly. I an debating whether to glue on a piece of rosewood veneer to cover it up. I'll probably wait to see how it looks as I sand it down in preparation for the finish.