Four Part Harmony

Got some old photos that I’ve been taking as I’ve been (very slowly) working on what has been the toughest part of the guitar so far…carving the neck.

It started out easy enough. I had a big old chunk of mahogany, from which I sawed off a ~1″x~3″ blank. I did my best to square it up with a hand plane.

I opted to do this as a multi-piece neck, though my piece of mahogany was large enough to cut as a single piece. The neck joint is stronger this way, and it saved quite a bit of wood. I’ve got enough wood left for at least one more neck. This photo shows the scarf joint being glued up, which establishes what will be the headstock of the guitar. It sits at approximately a 15 degree angle from the fingerboard. In hindsight, this all went pretty smoothly, but I had to be very careful in making the cut, truing up the surfaces and gluing everything up perfectly square.

Here’s the finished joint. Everything worked out great, stayed square etc.

Then I needed to glue up the heel block, on the end of the neck that attaches to the guitar. More squaring and agonizing over what really should be pretty straightforward. Still, when you’re messily spreading glue all over a piece of wood you’ve been sort of carefully fretting over, you can’t help but be a bit nervous.

Again, everything worked out pretty great though.

This is where it’s gotten interesting. I’ve started carving on the back of the neck. Here I’ve roughly sawed off some excess wood from the back of the headstock, and have started carving what I hope will become a diamond volute where the headstock transitions to the back of the neck. I could have chosen something much simpler, but I really wanted to do this diamond volute thing (again, like the old Martins). I have to admit I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just sort of slowly working, reading, and waiting for enlightenment.

But, as enlightenment can sometimes take a while to come around, I decided to move on to other parts of the neck. I needed to rout the truss rod, and was in desperate need of a router table. I had some brief grandiose plans of building a really nice fancy one, but realized I really just needed something quick and simple. I saw a plan for a similar setup in a book, and just decided to whip this thing together. I basically just routed a shallow slot for my laminate trimmer to mount underneath a sheet of 3/4″ plywood, and used a straight section of 2×2 pine for a fence. It’s ugly, but it worked like a champ.

Here’s the freshly routed truss rod channel.

And here’s the neck so far.

I’ve subsequently managed to glue on the ebony veneer for the peghead, and make a template of the peghead shape. Soon, I should be able to cut out the peghead shape and begin carving the rough profile of the neck. First though, I need to do some work fitting the neck to the guitar body which is now all glued up.

I know, I never got around to taking any pictures as I glued the top to the back and sides. I didn’t even get a picture of it prior to trimming of the excess material (messy job). Still here it is, the nearly finished soundbox. All that remains is to do the binding (a big scary job…the last thing I feel like doing is taking a router to this thing now that I’ve come this far.)

Here’s the back. You can see where the brace ends stick through. These will be covered by the binding.

Oh yeah, before I glued everything up I had to sign the inside of the top too. It almost seemed a little pretentious or silly or something, but it’s tradition and I figured I might as well. I gave this one serial #001. I thought three digits would be better than two, just in case I become prolific in my old age.