10/17/2004

It's been a while since I've been able to work on this project but I had an hour or so today and I used it to get to work on the neck. The neck will be made from birds-eye maple. I had a rough piece that was about 10 inches longer than I needed my blank to be. It was also about 1 1/8" thick when I only needed 1" finished thickness.

The first step was to plane one face true. I did that on my jointer. With one true face, I passed the board through my planer laying the board, true-face down. This gave me two flat and parallel faces. I kept passing the board through the planer until it was down to 1" thick. The next step was to joint one edge square to the faces. This was also done on the jointer. With one edge done, I brought the board over to the table saw and ripped the piece down to about 3 3/4" wide. The neck blank is now at 26" long by 3 3/4" wide by 1" thick.

The next step was to draw a center line down both sides and mark where the truss rod channel will be cut. My truss rod is 7/32" by 7/16" deep. The pictures below show the neck blank after the milling process I've described above and, some of its' components.

10/24/2004

Starting with a piece of rosewood that was roughly 26" long, 5" wide and 7/8" thick, I ran an edge across the jointer till it was straight. I then ripped it down to 2 pieces about 2 7/16" wide. I basically ripped it in half so that I'd be able to 2 fretboards from each piece.

I then jointed one face on the blank I was going to use for my fretboard. At that point, I wanted to re-saw the blank in half through it's thickness to get two fretboard blanks from the one piece. This part didn't work so well as I had severe drift in the blade on my bandsaw. The cut wasn't straight so I ended up only getting one fretboard blank out of that piece. So from there I just kept sending the usable blank through the planer until I had it planed down to roughly 1/4" thick. I finished up by cross-cutting the piece at the table saw to an unfinished length of about 20 1/4". Below is a picture of the fretboard blank sitting on my planer. The blank is ready for slotting.

10/24/2004

I also spent part of the morning making a taper jig. From some ply-wood, a 3/4" hinge and one friction lid support, I made a jig that will allow me to cut fretboard templates with the desired taper. My fretboard will be about 2 1/4" at the last fret and 2 1/16" at the nut. This jig will allow me to cut a taper into a piece, that is 2 1/4" wide at both ends, that narrows down to 2 1/16". I made the handle from a piece of pine I had in the scrap bin.

10/30/2004

I sat down and marked the fretboard using an excellent square (Starrett) and my drafting pencil. Without a purchased template (which I'm trying to avoid using throughout the project), it was difficult to mark most of the frets since in mm (I used metric), the fractions are to hard to judge on the ruler. So I approximated as well as I could and then compared my marks to the fret tang positions on my Ernie Ball Music Man Petrucci model. Then I would adjust my marks and re-check till they were accurate. Here's two pics of the pencil mark on the fretboard. NOTE: I can't stress enough, the importance of using a high quality square. I have two Starrett squares: a 4" and 6". They are, in my opinion, worth the money.

10/31/2004

Using a 7/32" carbide-tipped straight, single flute bit, I routed the truss rod channel. This was done making several passes removing about 1/16" of material till I hit a depth of about 7/16". The Hot-Rod truss-rod I'm using has a heel-side nut so I had to route a section about 1/2" long and 3/8" wide at that side. This was necessary in order to fit the wide barrel of the adjustment nut.

11/17/2004

Tonight I had a little time to go out and rough cut the neck. I outlined the shape in pencil using the master I made out of hardboard and cut close to the line on the bandsaw. This is a pretty straightforward step. Not much different than cutting out the body, etc.

11/20/2004

After marking the fret centers in pencil I set up a fence on my drill press, grabbed a 1/4" brad-point bit and started drilling. I set the depth stop by eye-balling it. I wanted a flush fit but if the inlay was a little high, I didn't mind since I still have to radius the fretboard. With the drill press off, I would position the board under the bit so the point of the bit would sit pefectly on my mark. Then, I'd turn on the press and drill. It took about 10 minutes to complete. Once that was done, I put some yellow glue into the holes and pressed the mother-of-pearl inlays in. I used a scrap block of wood to help press the dots in.

3/6/2005

My headstock was going to be 9/16" thick but I decided I wanted it to be 5/8" since it's so small. I decided to laminate the back with some Mahogany scraps left over from the body. I've seen this on some other customs and love the way it looked so it was a perfect reason to do it. The back of the headstock wasn't perfectly flat though and so I had to sand it against a block. Once it was flat, I glued and clamped the mahogany scrap to it. After 24 hours, I trimmed the mahogany on the bandsaw and then used a chisel and sandpaper to blend it to the headstock. I think it looks great.

3/6/2005

With my tuner template ready, I attached it to my headstock with some double-sided tape and scotch tape. In the future, I will transfer the holes to my neck template and drill the holes before I cut the headstock to thickness. I used a 3/8" Forstner bit for the tuner posts and a small Dremel bit that match the index pins on the Sperzel tuners. I guess it's about equal to a #36 bit. I got a little tear out on the face since I was drilling from the back. I'll want to avoid that next time. It isn't bad and I'll be able to fix it with a filler I will make from carpenter's glue and dust I've collected from sanding the birdseye maple.