Making the necks, Part 1: Roughing it all out.

The bodies are "done," pending final sanding and a little more scraping. So it's on to the necks. Can't say the finish line is in sight yet, but it's nice to cut some lumber again.

My son Brendan was home for a while over Spring break, before flying off to visit UC San Diego, where he'll be going to graduate school next Fall. He and I cut and assembled the basic neck laminations.

We decided to make a 3-piece hard maple laminated neck, with the three layers separated by a thin layers of Hondouras mahogany veneer. We made a basic template and cut out the six maple neck laminations, but when it came to cutting the veneer, the pieces split like crazy and were basically unmanageable.  So we made a sandwich out of scrap 1/4 ply, with four oversize pieces of veneer in the middle, and then nailed them all together with my lovely little 23 gauge pinner. Then we cut everything at once on the bandsaw, and were happy.

We squared up all the wet-glue laminations in this simple gluing jig,  then clamped the hell pit of them. The one in the foreground is dried, the one in the back almost. 

After we jointed the top surfaces  of the necks flat and square, and cutting the end piece at a 4 1/2degree angle, I couldn't put it off any longer: time to cut the neck mortise in the "finished" bodies. This router jig took a bunch of fiddling, but held the bodies tight and square while I cut the dovetail mortises as described with a nice new 14 degree bit. I had visions of some massive disatser here,  but all turned out well.

Bob Benedetto prescribes another elaborate router jig for making the dovetail tenons on the neck ends, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out why, so I went ahead and made the first (side) cuts on my router table, with the same bit I used for the body mortises. In this photo, also, the slot for the "slightly bowed" truss rod has been cut with a spiral bit on the router table. 

It wasn't until I had to make the back dovetail tenon cut along the heel of the neck that I realized why Benedetto uses a  special jig: There's no way to hold the neck flat along the now-small bottom surface and canted back at the 4 1/2 degree angle. Sooooo I sacrificed  a little meat on one of my small wood clams to make the surface bigger, and ran the whole thing through, clamp and all.  Luckily, I've got plenty of clamps, having bought out an assortment of about 50 different ones from a retiring woodworker.

My wonderful Wagner Safe-T-planer did a great job of leveling and tapering bost of the backs of the necks, and then a similar operation tapering and leveling the backs of the headstocks. 

I cut a small rabbet at the base of the top of the neck, thsn glued on the neck extensions as shown in the book. This is not a very strong joint, but it will be strengthened greatly when the fingerboard is glued in and when the neck and part of this extension is glued to the body.  One of these neck extensions did not align properly in gluing, and I had to face-glue some veneer to the front of it, then sand most of it off, to make it perfectly level with the rest of the neck top. No harm done. 

I added the headstock "ears" to make it a little wider, then cut the cavity for the truss rod end and adjuster. 

Here's the cavity at the other "head" end of the truss rod, where the the non-threaded part is. Not quite finished yet. When both end cavities were squared away, I cut and threaded the rods to size, wrapped the "slightly bowed" truss rods in a little felt, and glued a small strip of cherry over it to seal the slot.

I cut and collect burls from trees near my house.  A few years ago I cut this cherry burl, which I unwrapped (pieces had been coated with Penofin and tied back together to season) to look for a piece for one of the headstock top veneers.

These are the two headstock face veneers. On the left,  a piece of cherry veneer bandsawn from one of the burls in the photo above. On the right, a piece of cherry from some firewood with grain I admired and saved a few years ago. I wanted the two headstocks to look quite different.

Here's the current state of the necks: Headstock veneers in place, as are the thin curly cherry veneers on the back of the headstocks (beautiful stuff, left over from our kitchen cabinets). russ rods in place and snug. You can see the little veneer build-up I had to do on one of the neck extensions, but it's dead flat now.

My headstock blank on the left, Brendan's on the right. The top shape is similar to one of the Epiphone archtops. Brendan and I liked it because it's graceful and assymetrical.

Next job: fingerboards, bindings and inlays. The glam stuff.