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!

Today we’ll bolt the neck to the body. I must say, I wasn’t that excited about doing this part because the book laid out instructions on doing this with a dovetail joint. If you’ve never seen one it’s ok – it’s probably the most difficult way to do this. In July of last year I was invited to visit Marc Beneteau’s shop in St. Thomas, Ontario – he’s been building acoustic guitars since 1974. The method he uses for attaching neck to the bodies is a simple bolting system. I figured if it’s worked for him for the past 35 years then it should work for me. LOL

So here I’ve found the centre line and marked out where I want the threaded inserts to be. I purchased the bolts and inserts at Home Depot. They’re the exact bolts / inserts that Marc Beneteau uses. (View his website HERE)

Next I took the threaded insert (it has threads on the inside for the bolt and the outside to screw into the neck heel) and found a drill bit slightly smaller than it. I needed to drill out enough wood to countersink the insert but not so much that its threads wouldn’t grab tightly. I wrapped a piece of tape around the bit so I knew how deep I needed to go.

So once that was done I could thread the inserts into the neck heel with a big common screw driver. Not a perfect job but it worked – and in further posts you’ll see that it actually worked better than I thought it would!

Next time we’ll put the bolts into the body.

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!

Well now that I’ve calmed down over the blunder I had with the binding in the previous post, I’m going to get back at it here and start the final finishing of the binding.

For this next step which I found is very crucial to the finish, we need to scrap the sides down so that the binding and rosewood are even, level and true to each other. To do that I use cabinet scrapers. I’ve no idea why they’re called cabinet scrapers, I just know that they work very well and are very, very sharp. I picked up a whole set of different size ones at Lee Valley, as shown below.

So essentially, all that was needed was to scrape the excess wood down to an even surface. You can pretty much tell how far you need to go just by running the palm of your hand over it every once in a while. Here’s some pictures – the first you’ll see that it is mostly taking the white maple but in the second, as the level gets more and more level you can see it taking some of the rose wood.

Next time we’ll do the final step on the body (at least until we finish the neck), and that’s filling in all the itty bitty spaces.

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.

You see, Clark’s Guitars started out (obviously) with building acoustic guitars but considering how long this one has been taking, I’ve found that it’s just not a feasible business for replacing the money I make with roofing. So, long story short, I’ve decided to build electric guitars instead. If you haven’t already, check out this page: Clark’s Guitars Products Page

Now back to binding the acoustic, and the simple mistake I made that almost cost me the entire instrument…

Once the maple binding was in place, I was free to start sanding it level and smooth. The big problem here is that the binding cutter I used from Stewart MacDonald didn’t end up cutting the groove perfect – and if there’s one thing I’ve realized throughout this building process is that if it’s not perfect, it’ll look like crap. There were a few places where the angle just wasn’t right – this is likely due to the tiny, tiny roller bearing on the cutter that I needed to hold on to in order to keep it flat against the sides.

Here’s the cutter I used:

So in the end, after sanding, I had sanded right through the maple binding and into the perfling. You can see in the next image – in the areas where I sanded right through the maple, the groove was cut more like the left side.

Here’s the worst of the spots:

So what I ended up doing was cutting that section out and re-cutting it. What a mess. The pictures speak for themselves, so have a look.

After all of the messing around, here’s how it looks now: still not perfect but it’s better than it was.

I’ve learned a lot from this, and still may redo it again. Next time we’ll work a bit on the neck.

Here’s the body (you’ll recognize the picture, I’ve used it for the front page of the site) with a piece of the quilted maple banding that I got from A&M Wood Supply in Cambridge.

The book said to glue the purflings to the bandings prior to bending – apparently that was the easier method. What I found was that as soon as I needed to prebend each of the four pieces to the desired shape (they wouldn’t bend easily without heat and moisture), the purfling just separated from the banding like there wasn’t even any glue there – and with that, there was of course a couple pieces that just didn’t want to bend (or I’m just not experienced enough with the bending iron yet LOL). What a mess. See the below pics.

Once the bandings were all bent (after I took the purflings off), they were’nt all exactly the same so I placed them between a heavy chunk of wood and my bench vice while they dried and cooled.

So despite it all, the binding actually seemed like quite an easy task at first. Boy, was I wrong. So the first step was to put the purflings onto the body and glue them in place. The ones that were destined for the top and back were easy, as they just needed to be bent laterally. I glued them to the binding channels as laid out in the book. I laid out a double row of purflings here because the pattern I wanted called for two rows on the top.

Note the tape. This is just standard green painter’s tape. Also note in the next picture what happens when you take the tape off too fast without being careful.

We’ll continue next time with more binding.

So to start with, I’m using the same pattern as outlined in the book. To save a whole lot of typing trying to describe it, I’ll just show pictures as I go along and I’m sure you’ll get the jist of it. With the maple wedge piece cut to size I then needed to lay out the wedge shape onto the bottom of the body. I put painter’s tape along the edges to avoid unnecessary damage and continued to chisel out the recess. It needed to be about half as deep as the wedge was thick (about 1.5 mm).

So the MISTAKE I made was only making it as large as the wedge (idiot) – see on either side of the wedge I need to put some decorative purfling strips. So, I needed to either a) sand off a purfling width from both sides of the wedge OR b) chisel out a bit more of the rosewood. I Decided to stay safe and do the sanding.

Once it was sized properly, I cut a couple of my purfling strips (bought conveniently from A & M Wood Supply in Cambridge, ON) and laid them down beside the wedge. I was happy with it at this point, so I glued them down.

So then the ends of the wedge needed to be cut AND I DIDN’T MAKE A MISTAKE HERE!!! GO FIGURE!! See, the ends needed to be cut a bit longer to accomodate the purfling that will eventually be running up against it from the body contour (this will make more sense when you see the finished product – luckily I had the book to go by so I didn’t have to second guess this bit). So here I’ve cut the ends and it looks pretty good.

Next time we’ll start with some binding!! Yay!

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

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…