The Neck

It has not been an overly productive week in the shop. I have been very busy with scouting out more promo opportunities and looking for various suppliers for various things. However, I have managed to do a number of steps with Vicky's neck.

After I unclamped Vicky's neck from the initial glue up I honed up the fret board and peghead face surfaces. There was a lot of extra Carbon Fiber protruding from these surfaces and I spent a good chunk of time taking it down by hand using an extruded piece of aluminum bar as the ultimate sanding block. I achieved perfectly flat surfaces. Carbon Fiber is rough on machine blades. I originally sent the neck through my jointer and sparks flew up! Doing this step by hand is worth the extra time I think.

I then turned the neck around and taped the neck onto a wedge shaped jig bed. With my over head router I planed the slight taper on both the main neck and peghead setting the final tapers and thicknesses.

I when transition sanded and blended the peghead to the rest of the neck. Once a perfect transition was met I glued on a stellar piece of Ebony veneer. The Ebony adds strength to this transition area.

Next, I turned the neck back around and routed out a large area of the Maple center that follows the taper of the neck. I set in a perfectly quarter sawn piece of Spruce. The Spruce runs right into the peghead area and adds strength to the transition. I also did a before and after weigh in and managed to save a full 2 ozs! Adding strength and losing weight is what it's all about.

The last few steps were to rout in for the two way adjustable truss rod and glue on the peghead Ebony veneer along with trimming the peghead to final dimension with my peghead router template.

More work on the neck will be executed tomorrow. I would also like to glue in the neck block and tail block Spruce into the guitar rim.