11/21/2004

Today was the "get over the hump" day for this project as far as I was concerned. I needed to get the "hard" stuff finished. That meant taking the rough shaped neck and cutting the taper into it as well as shaping the heel. I'll do this, glue in the fretboard, shape that and then lastly, shape the headstock. The task I had to complete first though was to true the edges on my hardboard neck master. I jointed an edge on some scrap oak and screwed it to the neck master aligning the trued oak edge with the edge of the master making sure the taper was correct. Aquick pass on the router table with a bearing bit and it was perfect. I repeated those steps on the other side of the master.

With this done, I could screw the master to the neck and using the same bearing bit, trim the taper on the neck. I screwed the master to the fretboard side of the neck since I would be covering the screw holes with the fretboard.

1/4/2005

Today, I also started shaping the neck-back on my spindle sander. I set up a fence so that I could rest the neck against it while I pushed the neck past the spindle. I would change the position of the fence from time to time to allow different angles of the neck against the spindle. This was a total "feel" process. I kept removing wood until I liked the feel. At this point, I'm going to take some measurements of the neck thickness and compare it to my other guitars before I decide to final shape with sand-paper and blocks.

1/5/2005

Did a little more work today on the neck heel and head-stock transition. I roughed in the shape with a rasp and finished with sand-paper. The last picture in this series is the neck sanded to 80 grit.

1/6/2005

Today, I sanded the neck to 220 grit.