Routing A Perfect Ellipse?

[j. pierce]

Kind of a weird question…

So I'm working on my plan or my next build, and the way I've drawn it up, there's an exposed (as far as, visible from the top) neck tenon extending past the fretboard.

The end of this tenon, the look I'm going for is the end being half an ellipse, split along its narrow diameter - if it were an entire ellipse, it would be 2" across it's widest diameter, and 1" across it's shorter diameter.

Now, planning to make my templates, how would one make this shape? I could carefully cut and sand templates by hand and hopefully arrive at something that not only fits perfectly, but is the actual shape I'm going for. This may prove to be the most practical way to do it - at this point, it certainly seems so.

I know how to draw an ellipse using two focal points and a string or whatever, and I've seen cross-track jigs to do such with a router; these jigs seem mildly expensive, although some of them seem to be something I could create on my own. Most however, they're made for creating a large ellipse (such as for a sign or whatever.) Even a scaled down version to work with a dremel would still create a larger profile than I need.

One method that seems to be to use the above method to create a large ellipse and have the base of a router or dremel ride against this to create a smaller ellipse. Of course, then if becomes a process to make the matching other side of the template…

This is a minor detail in the design, and could certainly be replaced by a half a circle, a arc section, another shape, or something hand made that is "close enough". Another option would be to have suitable templates CNC'd for me, and I may end up having such a thing done for some of the things I repeat often and would like to have better templates for.

I think I'm over-focused on something that's of little importance to the build; but I'm wondering if there's a way to create this small ellipse that I'm totally missing at this point…