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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.

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