Okay, so it has been a lot longer than I thought it would be before I posted again, but I've been pretty busy with work. At this point I guess I need some help on what to do about my build. My plans changed quite a bit since my last post, the relevant changes being a switch to an esp mk II style (I bought the plans from guitarplansunlimited.com after realizing that trying to design my own shape might be more than I am up to right now) and a decision to ditch the top and fancy inlay and just do dot inlays this time around. My current problem is that after cutting the neck to thickness and doing the scarf joint, the blank seems like it might be too thin to use. Since I don't have a band saw, a circular saw was used to get the thickness close to the line and a belt sander (hand-held) brought it to the thickness line.
Unfortunately, in the process, the blank got really close to what is probably too thin. To make matter worse, after I hand sawed the scarf joint, the wood needed a lot of leveling before a good straight glue-up would happen, so the belt sander was used to level the newly cut faces. This is where it took a turn for the worse. The belt sander demolished the tip of the neck blank, leaving some paper thin flaps where a smooth taper had been previously. After a lot of hand sanding, I got the surfaces to match up for a glue-up at a steeper angle, which I hope won't be an issue because of the locking nut (someone correct me if I am wrong). The change in angle has left me with at least 1/16th of an inch to sand off the the top of the neck to bring the whole surface to level. Since this will leave the neck on the thin side, I was planning on gluing a thin strip of wood between the neck and fretboard to make up for the lost thickness before routing for the truss rod. This doesn't, however, fix the lack of thickness on the back of the neck right below the nut (right where a volute would go if I were to do one). Currently, it would seem that my options are to either start over on a new neck and buy a decent hand-plane so I can avoid the belt sander or try to thicken up the back of the neck below the nut with a thin piece of wood (I don't really see how this can work too well, but maybe someone here can give some advice).
At this point I am completely open to suggestions, having most likely wasted quite a bit of money on a neck that will never see use. How much thickness needs to be left under a dual action truss rod from LMI? If the neck is too thin to allow that, is a thin piece of wood between the neck and FB a feasible fix? Does anyone have some tips on how to deal with the back of the neck on the headstock side?
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer. If necessary, I can get some pictures up here, but it may take a few days because I'll most likely be stuck using my parent's computer while I reinstall my OS and get everything up and running again.
-Andrew