Continuing on the neck

We let the scarf joint rest overnight, just to make sure that the glue had set. When I came back in the shop, there was some cleaning up to do on the head stock. I leveled the headstock down using a planer and then sanded it to make it completely flat. At this time, I set the nut witdth and determined the size of the neck. On the picture, you can see the drawing of what the final look of the neck will be. Using a spindle sander, I was able to take down the area that will make up the nut of the neck. This allows for me to be able to take the neck down using a band saw.

I then cut the channel for the truss rod. This is a metal rod that is placed inside the mahogany, underneath the fingerboard. This allows for additional strength of the neck. Additionally, some truss rods - like the one that I will be using, allows for slight changes in the relief of the neck. This means that you can allow for the neck to be a little convex or concave. This metal rod, which will be shown more later, allows a player to make modifications in that shape so that the string height is correct. I also cut the the excess wood off the sides of the neck and head stock.

In this picture to the left, you can also see the Koa veneer that will be glued onto the headstock and act as the head plate. This will be discussed more later, once we are ready for the glue up.

Okay, this is where this build gets a little crazy. So, for the past few posts, you have seen images of a beautiful piece of mahogany that will be used for the neck. Mahogany is kind of a finicky thing. It is important to use quality material and that the wood has straight grain and is quatersawn. Well, my instructor Dan came in to the shop before I got there and he saw that the wood had begun to twist. The grain may have had a little runoff, which caused this. Due to the nature of what we are doing with the neck, it is very important to not have the neck twist on you. Therefore, we had to completely scrap the neck and start from scratch. It is the nature of the beast of being a luthier. Your instrument is only as good as the materials you use. Therefore, we completely re-did everything that I had originally showed you. Since I would rather not bore you to death again, we will just act like this never happened and go on from here.

At this stage in the game, I began to shape my Spanish heel. I first drew the contour of the bottm of the heel out on the mahoganny and began to shave away a lot of material using a chisel. What I was trying to accomplish was a completely flat surface on both sides that would look like the base of a triangle. The reason that we do this now, and not when we do the neck shaping is becuase the area we are working with is a very delicate area. This is where the sides of the instrument are to be glued in. If we did the heel shaping when the sides were in, we have a likelihood of causing damage to the sides with the chisel and rasps. I continued with this for quite some time until I felt comfortable with flat surfaces. I then began to take additional wood out with the chisel to make sweeps that look similar to the traditional heel. When I felt comfortable with that, I used a radiused sanding block to make it so both sides looked the same. This can be troublesome, so you want to take extra care so that each side looks identical. Here you can see the contour of the heel looks relatively similar on both sides.

At this, I began to make a series of faceted cuts along the heel in order to make the contour of the heel continue towards the back. This is a relateively delicate process as mahoganny sometimes likes to chip out when you use a chisel. Once those cuts are made, I took a rasp to the cuts even them out so that there were no high spots. This process takes a bit of time as you constantly have to look at both sides and use your fingertips to feel the high spots and the low spots. Finally, the last step in heel carving is to take a sanding drum, to the heel. Finally, after a few hours of work, the heel was finished.

Once the heel was completed, I then glued up the headstock veneer. Though the headplate is usually looked at as a decarative piece, it also allows for additionally stability where the strings are attached to the neck. Without this, there is a possibility of the headstock separating from the neck altogether. For this guitar, I have decided to use a nice piece of curly Koa. It matches very well with the top, back and sides, so I think it works very well. I have put a thin piece of white laminate between the mohaganny and koa, just to offset it a little bit.

As you can see we put a fair amount of clamping pressure on the veneer. This is to make sure that we do not see any gaps between the layers as aestically, it would not look right with them.

We let the glue set for a few minutes using spring clamps (the orange ones you see above), and after the glue has set a bit, I put luthier clamps on the headstock, as this will give added pressure.

At this time, the neck is pretty much ready to be set up with the body of the guitar. I will most likely do some work on the headstock, to get it set with the slots and the tuner holes. But that will come later.