Spring Break 2012

As you have gathered, I really only have time to update my posts during breaks from my day job. As I mentioned in an earlier post I am always amazed at how much time work takes away from the important stuff like building a guitar or updating the blog on building a guitar. Well, it is Spring Break and I have a little time to do just that so, here goes. My last post was over Christmas break and I got the blog caught up and made some progress on the guitar. I completed the binding and purfling on the guitar body. As with every step in this process it was a huge learning adventure. I was not completely satisfied with the end result but decided to continue and try and work through the problems. At this point I decided to go back to the neck and start (continue) working on it. It was the very first part of the guitar I started with and once I had a rough shape I moved on to other parts. To recap, I glued up maple to create a blank for the neck. I rough cut the blank to the basic neck shape. Planed the head to get it smooth and flat, then cut the sides to finish the rough shape. Well, as it turned out, I shouldn't have cut the sides. As I found out later they needed to be square to use as a guide to route out the channel for the truss rod. Luckily I still had the scrap pieces I had trimmed of on the band saw. For once it paid off being cheap and never throwing anything away! I reattached the side pieces temporarily using a brad pinner and a couple of well placed 3/4" brads on each side. This worked well and gave me straight edges again to use as guides to run along the fence on the router table. The truss rod that I decided to use is a Martin style 7/16" wide x 13/32" deep, aluminum U channel assembly. I used a 7/16" straight router bit so I could cut the channel width in one pass. The 13/32" depth was cut in several passes to get a cleaner cut. The fence  was set to cut the channel in the center of the neck. Stops were set for the length of the cut and the depth of the bit was set to approximately 1/8". Several cuts were made extending the depth until the final cut at 13/32" was made. After the channel was cut in the neck I simply pried the sides off and removed the brads. I could now start shaping the neck. I started by cutting templates out of pvc plastic to use as guides for the curve of the under side of the neck. One was cut with the appropriate radius under the 10th fret and one for under the 1st fret.

First and tenth neck radius templates.

The idea here is fairly simple start at both ends of the neck and establish the right radius and then connect the two with a smooth transition.

Clamp neck to work table.

Cutting radius with rasp.

Checking radius with template

Using rasp to cut first fret radius.

Checking first fret radius.

 Shaping the neck takes a lot of hand work with a wood rasp and a spoke shave. Once I was close to the final shape I realized that the finger board needed to be attached before the final shaping.