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So here’s the most critical part……the NECK ANGLE.

We need to get the neck mounted not only on the right angle to the body but parallel with the body’s centre line. So considering the fretboard will be roughly 7mm thick, and the saddle will be roughly 9.5mm, I made up a couple of spacers at those thicknesses and placed them on the body. I then put a straight-edge resting on them to get the angle and locked it in with my angle tool ($4.95 at any hardware store).

So then that measurement needed to be transferred to the neck, as below. What I also did, from reading different peoples’ blogs online was cut the heel portion of the neck at a slight angle towards the centre line so the sides of the butt end of the neck would meet the body as tightly as possible.

So here I’ve transferred the angle from my angle tool onto the bandsaw. I’ll line it up as closely as possible at this point because this could destroy the whole thing! I put this part off for so long because I was terrified to throw away *yet another* neck, but all in all it actually worked out pretty well. If the angle is off horizontally the headstock would be off the centre line. If the angle is off vertically, the string action will be too low (possibly even touch the frets) in the higher fret range.

So it turned out really well, despite my worrying. When lined up on the centre line of the body, the headstock is tilted 1/32″ to the left. I’d say that’s quite manageable. Next time we’ll bolt the neck to the body! Yay!

Hi there! I feel rather guilty because I’ve been spending so much time making the Telecasters that I haven’t given the acoustic the attention it needs. Nonetheless I have got the neck to a point where I can now cut the angle where the neck joins the body. But before I got to that point I needed to do a few things…..

Firstly the trussrod channel needed to be cut. Now, I know that everyone I’ve seen do this uses a router and indeed I have tried to use one too – but what I’ve found is that the Mastercraft routers from Canadian Tire aren’t very dependable when cutting fine woods such as this. See, on the ‘01′ guitar I made, I went through three necks because the first time, the router depth gauge let go during routing which resulted in the channel being way too deep. The second time the bit came loose and once again went way too deep. After regaining my patience I tried a third time and the depth gauge broke. Patience lost.

So with all that in mind I decided to use my table saw instead. The only problem I faced is that the channel needs to be deeper where it meets the body and gradually shallower as it nears the headstock. I accomplished this with some shims I just taped to the neck.

So next I needed to dry fit the trussrod and see how it fit. I’ll tell you here, the trussrod I used I got from Stewart MacDonald (it needed to be sized to length and the end threaded). I really like this trussrod as it’s small, durable and easy to work with. So here you can see the rod just laying in the channel as a dry fit.

The only other thing I needed to do to it was drill out the hole that the end of the trussrod would fit into – see the trussrod itself threads into a brass cylindrical piece that provides the ’stop’ that the trussrod actually tightens against. I put the neck on the drill press, measured how deep I needed the hole and marked the drill bit. Then I carefully drilled it out. Here’s the results:

Next time we’ll fix up the binding a bit more.

Hi there, well I finally got the pictures out of the camera last night and finished sizing them for the site. Wow, I didn’t realize how camera happy I am LOL.

This hopefully final attempt at a neck started out as a solid piece of Honduran mahogany. I ripped it into two halves and then planed them down to exactly 1″ thick. I did this so I could follow the exact measurements as laid out in the book. It started out at around 40″ long.

And here they are after planing:

I then cut them to length and glued them up. I use my vise as a clamp sometimes, it helps to hold the piece while I work on the other side.

The black stuff is the paper it was sitting on in the vise. See the four layered end was glued in the vise first (no picture of that) and there was black paper underneath it.

So now here’s the final glued assembly after I ran it through the thickness planer to get it exactly the same width all the way along. Notice I’ve already drawn the outline of where it needed to be cut on the bandsaw. Remember I’m just following the blueprints from the book at this point not only for the thickness measurement but for the angle the headstock is on as well.

And now here it is on my bandsaw, fresh from being cut.

Because the bandsaw isn’t a perfectly straight cut I felt I needed to hand plane off the back of the headstock down to just above my pencil line to get it relatively flat. Once that was done it seemed like I might actually succeed with this attempt. Goodness knows I don’t want to keep wasting this mahogany!!!

We’ll start binding the body next time…