OK, I’ve begun the 2nd guitar in ernest. I started with the neck.
When building a guitar neck you need 3 basic elements.
- The neck body. This is where the fret is on up to the 14th fret.
- The headstock. This is angled down from the neck body by about 15 degrees and is where the tuner machines are placed.
- The neck block. This is underneath the neck body at the opposite end from the headstock and contains the bulk of the material that make up the tenon which joins the neck to the guitar body.
I started with the headstock. The raw neck blank is at least 30″ long. You cut an angled cut and smooth the surface so that you can have a tight glue joint. I cut the joint with a hand saw. Given the neck is maple, this took a lot of effort to do at all but more importantly get close to square. I used hand planes and scrapers to do this smoothing and final squaring.
My next step will be the neck block. Here are some shots of my glue up of the headstock from the scarf cut. In the second shot, you can see the tight joint I was able to get. I did use wax paper to keep from glueing my glue calls to the neck.
UPDATE: Well, the top of the joint looked great but the other side was pathetic. Clearly this glue up technique (clamping the neck body down to the bench) didn’t work for me. I got a new blank and so I’ll try it again and use this piece for the heal block. I also got a plane maple neck blank so I will try 2 necks at once and pick the best out. Right now, I will focus on getting the tightest joint I can. I’m close but stopped for the day so that I can redouble my effort tomorrow.
