First Build....

[AprilEthereal777]

I use a large ball shaped die grinder...no tear out.

That sounds like what we need RG. Not sure what it is though . Drill attachment?

[RGman]

lol, yes should be able to buy the bits at bunnings...they are pink or white or grey depending on the grit i think?

[Blackdog]

lol, yes should be able to buy the bits at bunnings...they are pink or white or grey depending on the grit i think?

You mean something like a mounted stone ??

[RGman]

Yes, same stuff used in bench grinder wheels, but in shapes.

[pmarlin]

I havent tried the cove bit but just thinking about the tearout story made me think that it would be a better idea to drill a hole first so that the cove bit has less wood to get hung up on. Just a theory.

[AprilEthereal777]

I havent tried the cove bit but just thinking about the tearout story made me think that it would be a better idea to drill a hole first so that the cove bit has less wood to get hung up on. Just a theory.

I actually had the holes already drilled for the pots and on that build used a rotary dial, so had 3 holes all up. I'll try and post some before and after pics later to show the result. Must admit, I didn't take a photo of the butchery though......

Thanks for th extra info RG......a grinding bit for the drill press in the right shape sounds like the best method I have come across.....and after my experience with the cove bit, I have searched quite a bit!

[AprilEthereal777]

First pic is after the first time I used a cove bit in a drill press......worked well and the Jarrah top held together without a hitch.

Second pic is BEFORE I used the same method on my 2nd build. This is a Sheoak top, looks awesome, but I reckon must be very weak after the tearout I got. This doesn't show the pot holes but they were done first before the 3rd one tore.

My 'new' carve shape after removing the bottom round corner of the carve.....it was either this, or throw it away. For those interested, this is a 19mm bookmatched top on a 30mm Queensland Maple one piece body.

Well, I ended up with a nice axe that plays well etc. Just not what I had intended. I have great respect for people like Drak that are ruthless enough to 'burn em' when they don't come up right......as for me, I just can't waste something that may have some use, and I am quite keen on having many guitars

Anyway, hope this helps someone understand the perils of the cove bit although I am not suggesting my experience will be everyone's.

[Blackdog]

OK, time for an update.

I bought the router bit for the dishing of the control holes as suggested. Worked very well, only problem is that for the speed knobs I want to use, the dishing is rather small. It ends up hidden by the knob... I'll have to see if I can get a slightly bigger bit (or smaller knobs). But no accidents, thanks Leo.

I also made a new control cavity cover. This time I got some maple and mahogany veneer. Made my own plywood of mahogany/maple/mahogany, cross grained, and cut the cover from that. It looks fantastic (much better than the walnut veneered plywood I tried before) and it's surprisingly rigid. Just what's needed. I might do the same for the jack plate, let's see.

The commissioned neck should have been ready by now, but it's still going to take a good while... Fortunately an alternate solution came across my way, last saturday at a local guitar show. A retired builder had a couple of left-overs to sell, and for 35 euros I got this nice Piece of Wood. It was even rougher, at the time of the picture I had already shaped the head (it was a big paddle), and trimmed the fretboard for lenght, at the nut and body end.

It's a nice one piece Flame Maple neck with an even nicer Birdseye fingerboard. It was already tapered, with the truss rod installed and the fingerboard glued on. But this kind of money won't even buy the woods !!

So a lot of progress has been made. I drilled the Pegholes. And after spending some time building a router sled for neck work I cleaned the excess fingerboard wood and thicknessed The Heel (still need to cut it shorter).

Here's a picture of the tuners test-fit:

I'm very happy. I get to do a lot more by myself: Carving the back of the neck, radiusing and slotting the fretboard and doing the fretwork. So this is much more like making my own neck.

For build #2 neck I'll have the chance to do the couple of tasks that were done for me on this one, like routing and installing the truss rod, tapering the neck and gluing on the fingerboard. I'm very confident with the router now, so I don't expect any major surprises with those.

I never expected to build a maple neck/fingerboard guitar, but it might sound nice on the all-mahogany body. It will certainly look good.

Comments, warnings, critics always welcomed.

[xDrugFreeJonnyx]

Very nice looking! I love the wood you are using for a fretboard, that will be AWESOME

[PTU 7's.]

You're working very tidy, man. Nice carve you made there.

Keep on working, it goes very good.

[Blackdog]

OK, some progress has been made...

Another...

The body and 12th fret inlays have been designed and executed by my wife (but I taught her how to do it, shhhh....)

The body inlay...

A complementing design is going to grace the truss rod cover.

Also the neck heel has been finished, and the neck pocket has been routed on the body.

This went less than great. I had the problem of having routed the neck pickup cavity weeks ago. My follower router bit is only 1"long, and so routing the neck pocket was more problematic: it ended having some 0.3 mm gap all around with respect to the neck heel.

This is a major setback. So I'm basically looking at making a new neck altogether to properly fit the existing pocket. This one will have to go on another build.

It is unfortunate as the idea of the flame/birdseye maple neck had grown on me, it definitely looked nice, now I'll have go back to the more traditional mahogany/rosewood combo. But I'm learning a lot after all...

[Geo]

It looks beautiful dude. Fantastic.

I don't know if you need to make a new neck. You could probably make it fit well with some veneer.

[black_labb]

i put a cove bit into the router with a 1/2" bearing above the blades (its a 1/2" cove bit with a 1/4" shank) and drilled some holes into some plywood, one being larger and one being smaller. they were used as templates and just ran the smaller cove bit around the template and then across the centre a number of times to get the centre as flat as i could. this meant i was less likely to get tearout (a smaller bit) it had a flat bottom (after a bit of sanding) and looked great. also means you can tailor the size of the recess. you could even make a oddly shaped cavity. could work as a type of body inlay and stain the inside or something.

i may post some photos at some stage.

[Blackdog]

i put a cove bit into the router with a 1/2" bearing above the blades (its a 1/2" cove bit with a 1/4" shank) and drilled some holes into some plywood, one being larger and one being smaller. they were used as templates and just ran the smaller cove bit around the template and then across the centre a number of times to get the centre as flat as i could. this meant i was less likely to get tearout (a smaller bit) it had a flat bottom (after a bit of sanding) and looked great. also means you can tailor the size of the recess. you could even make a oddly shaped cavity. could work as a type of body inlay and stain the inside or something.

i may post some photos at some stage.

I get the idea, it makes great sense. I think I'll give it a try. Being basically template guided is much more versatile than the simpler round bit approach.

Thanks for sharing.

[Blackdog]

I don't know if you need to make a new neck. You could probably make it fit well with some veneer.

I got some great advice from our fellow member Mattia on how to use some maple veneer to solve this problem and I'm very happy to say that now I have a "close to perfect" fit. You can actually hold the guitar from the neck at any position (even horizontal) and the neck will not even move. And it's perfectly aligned too.

So I'm on with the next challenge: to saw the fret slots on the fingerboard.

I can already see that the tasks related to the neck require something that wasn't quite that critical when making the body: PRECISION.

I'm starting to think that the most important part of this craft is to make the necks... A good neck could be attached to a toilet seat (provided the neck pocket and bridge position are accurate) and it would still be a playable guitar !!! I even think it has been done....

For future builds I will concentrate on making a good neck first. Then make a good neck pocket on the barely shaped body blank, and take it from there. Having to deal with a neck pickup cavity and a less than perfectly flat top (after carving) generated most of the problems I had.

Edited October 12, 2007 by Blackdog

[Blackdog]

Progress report.

The fingerboard has been slotted.

This proved to be more delicate than I had anticipated.

The FB was already glued to the neck and the whole neck already tapered, but I have a nice steel ruler with marks on both edges, so by drawing the centerline on the fretboard and aligning the ruler's marks to that (on both sides) I could draw the slots positions perpendicular to the centerline without much trouble. All the slot marks were measured from the nut (to avoid error propagation) and doublechecked against a pre-slotted FB I have for a future build.

The neck blank's back was fortunately still parallel to the FB surface, so clamping the neck was not an issue. To guide and support the saw perpendicular to the FB I cut a 6cm piece of an "L" shaped aluminum beam that I clamped on the FB with the corner edge aligned to each position and to the centerline. All in all I believe it ended up OK.

Next I tapered the neck back to the desired depths at the 1st and 12th frets using the router sled I made specifically for working on this neck. This jig proved to be invaluable for all the work on this neck. I was pleased to find out that I still had a little extra wood to work out a small volute. I also shortened the heel and drum-sanded the transition.

I put the side dots too. I made these out of 2mm brass wire I had around. Not terribly visible, but they look classy.

Finally got to try the carving. I have to agree with Mattia and Mickguard, this is really fun stuff. It's not yet finished, but pretty close. With the neck tapered to the proper depths I drawed a centerline along the back and removed wood from the sides leaving the pencilmark undisturbed. I run roundover router bits along the edges first (9.5mm and 12.7mm) to remove some of the bulk, then it was all rasps, files, scrapers and sandpaper. It took me 3x 1 1/2 hrs sessions to get to this point:

Overall neck.

Head end.

Heel end.

As I said, it will probably require one more carving session, but this is starting to look like a proper guitar even from the backside:

Next steps: Radiusing the fretboard, and we'll see if the 12th fret inlay survives the camber (it's 1.5mm pearl, it's going to be close).

And fretting !!! This is going to be an interesting one too.

Thanks again to everyone at this forum for the help, either by answering my questions or by the enourmous amount of good advice that's in this wonderful forum !!

[ngaa]

Great job carving the neck and the heel, looks fantastic!

[Prostheta]

I would vote on dropping the "McCarty" on the headstock, but other than that it's coming along very nicely for a first build. How does the neck sight from the bridge end? If you get that part of it nice and straight and the string path on the mark for your bridge on your first set-neck instrument then you've won half the battle.

Go to it, Blackdog!

[Blackdog]

I would vote on dropping the "McCarty" on the headstock, but other than that it's coming along very nicely for a first build. How does the neck sight from the bridge end? If you get that part of it nice and straight and the string path on the mark for your bridge on your first set-neck instrument then you've won half the battle.

Go to it, Blackdog!

Thanks for the encouraging words.

The "McCarty" cover was there just for the mockup. The official TRC is a design consistent with the body and 12th fret inlays:

We have it already inlaid in rosewood and maple, still uncut. We'll see wich one looks better on this guitar. BTW, does anybody know what's the wood used for the headstock veneer ?? I bought the neck blank with the veneer already there and I have no clue...

The neck ended very well aligned with the centerline of the body. String geometry shouldn't be a problem and alignment with the PU polepieces should be quite good. Anyway, I'll drill the holes for the bridge posts (a Wilkinson wrap-around BTW) after I have glued the neck on.

[Blackdog]

Yet another small step for a man..... Well, almost a giant leap for THIS man.

Finalized the shaping of the neck back. I'm really proud how well it feels on the hand.

BTW, has anybody used this tool when carving the neck ?? I think it's called a Profile Gauge or something. Never seen it mentioned before, but it's great for checking the progress while carving the neck, determining the simmetry and would be invaluable in reproducing an existing neck profile. Highly recommended and 13 euros at KarWei....

Also tried some light tinting of the wood. I was after enhancing the flame a little.

I used SMD ColorTone Concentrated Liquid Stain, dilluted in alcohol. Then sanded to get rid of most of the color. But the results were less than spectacular. The neck ended up slightly tinted all around and only a marginal enhancement of the flame. What did I do wrong ??

Now

Before

Additionaly the fretboard has been cambered quite successfully and I have started my first ever fret job !!!

I used the sanding block and the fret caul set on the drill press from SMD. The frets were radiused with the jig sold by ebay seller zdguitars, great stuff and much cheaper than SMD's.

So far looking great:

Tomorrow I'll clip and file the fret ends... Looks like I'll be glueing the neck to the body this weekend.

[ngaa]

Looks good, I love that fretboard.

[Maiden69]

get it wet with spirits and you will see how it will look once cleared. Stain like that look ver subtle before the clear is applied.

[Mattia]

Yeah, only thing that went 'worng' is that there's nothing wetting the look. Stain on its own looks plain, well, ugly, really. Flat, bit dull, uninteresting.

Also, the StewMac transtints can be (I'd say should be) diluted a whole bunch before use. A few drops go a long, long way.

[Blackdog]

Yeah, only thing that went 'worng' is that there's nothing wetting the look. Stain on its own looks plain, well, ugly, really. Flat, bit dull, uninteresting.

Also, the StewMac transtints can be (I'd say should be) diluted a whole bunch before use. A few drops go a long, long way.

Thanks for the replies....

Yes, I diluted the stain a lot. I actually used a few drops in 50ml of alcohol.

I think I'll use shellac for the finish of the neck and body and spray some coats of nitro on the fretboard from a rattle can I already have. So the shellac should bring more of the flame out then.

[Blackdog]

Some significant progress has been made during a very productive weekend.

I finished the ends of the frets on friday.

Still, before attaching the neck to the body I had to enlarge the "dishes" for the controls on the top. The existing dishes had been made with a large cove bit in one go, they looked nice but were too small and ended up completely hidden by the knobs. Following black_labb's suggestion I got a round nose router bit with a top bearing. So I built a template for a bigger "dish" for the top controls and was much more pleased with the results.

Then, after rechecking the alignment of the neck in the pocket one more time, it got hold of the old Titebond and boldly faced the Moment of Truth. The following morning things were looking promising already.

After a long day I could actually put things together yesterday. I measured and remeasured and finally drilled the holes for the bridge. I manufactured some attachments to mount the P90s and tried a test fit. And using a cheap precut plastic nut I put a set of strings and tuned more or less to pitch. Since it was kind of late I thought it was probably a good idea to leave the neck under nominal string tension for some time before doing any serious evaluation of things.

So from my first impressions: Strings align well, and the bridge seems to be in the proper position. I definitely have a problem with a few tall frets (the 12th definitely, and maybe also the 17th). But it was time to stop for the day.

But even though the pickups are not even wired, the nut is too tall and not the one that goes there and no action/relief/intonation or anything has been adjusted yet, it pretty much looks like a guitar already !!!

Another...