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Hi all, I know it’s been QUITE a while since my last post but the construction had been put on hold to make room for a bunch of Telecasters! (you can see the Telecaster necks in the background of the next pic)

Nonetheless, as promised here’s the post about attaching the neck to the body…..

So before I rushed through all this I decided to take my time and do it properly so I didn’t goof up too badly LOL. I laid my straight rule on the top of the body and marked a centre line. This would line up with the trussrod channel I cut into the neck. That should give me exact centre.

Next, with some careful measuring, I was able to mark the locations where the bolts needed to go. Not an easy task, given that any (I mean ANY) variance in this measurement would mean that the neck would be completely off centre. Remember that the bolts need to go through the mahogany block that’s inside the top of the body.

So with the hole locations marked, I set out to drill the holes. Thankfully my drill has one of those bubble levellers on top so drilling a straight hole wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Once the holes were drilled I stuck the bolts through to see how they lined up.

Next time we’ll install the trussrod.

Cheers!

Hi all, it’s time to do the binding!

So I knew that I couldn’t use a router in the traditional way because that would assume that the angle between the top / back and the sides is exactly 90º, and it’s not – see picture below.

So the I decided to turn my router upside down and build a stupid contraption to do the cutting for me. And of course stupid me didn’t think about how this contraption would cut the inside of the curves (duh).

So after a bit of modification I came up with this:

In case you’re wondering those circles are from when I was testing out my circle jig that I got from Lee Valley. Now, you’d think that this jig would have worked allright but after running through a few test pieces I decided that it was WAY too powerful a tool to use for my first time doing this (the practice piece got chewed up pretty quick, and not in a good way). So what I ended up doing was buying this nifty little tool from Stewart Macdonald:

Although it is a specialized tool that was specifically built for this purpose, I felt it could have been designed a bit better. You see the tiny little roller bearing? You have to hold on to that while your rotary tool spins a highly sharpened blade at 20,000 RPM about 1/8″ away from your fingers – just a little disheartening. Regardless, I still have my fingers and it worked out OK for the most part. I planned on a two step design so I wasn’t making it very easy on myself for my first time doing this!

Next time we’ll do the end cap wedge detail or whatever you call it, even though we should have done that post before this one LOL