Dave Higham

So, onward and upward… I made a template for the headstock shape. It’s held in position by dowels in pilot holes for the string anchors. I cut out the headstock shape leaving about 2mm extra all round. And routed the finished shape. This was done face down on the router table. It’s really worth making a simple router table for this sort of job. Using a hand-held router for this would be very risky, as it would be too easy for the router to tilt and ruin the outline. On the router table it’s a doddle. The strings will be held in ferrules with Allen setscrews (grubscrews). These are the access holes for the grubscrews. Before gluing the fingerboard on, I set it up on the milling machine and ran a cutter through skimming the end of the fingerboard and the edge of the headstock veneer. This should give me a perfectly square and parallel slot for the nut. Then I glued the fingerboard on. This is just to show you what it looks like when I don’t tidy up for the photo.

Well, I’m still here and haven’t gone up in smoke, in spite of being between the two biggest forest fires France has seen for years. 80 square miles of forest lost and they got to within 12 miles of us on either side. So what with one thing and another I seem to have neglected this thread again. Anyway, I was about to glue this bit of wood onto the back of the headstock, and thereby hangs the tale of the second minor disaster involving it. To make sure the 1/16” maple (and the thin black dyed veneer I’m going to put under it) is pressed hard against the back of the headstock in the curved area, I decided I needed a caul with a slightly resilient surface. So I made a caul, allowing for the different thicknesses being clamped and glued onto it a sheet of cork. Then I glued up the veneers and clamped the whole assembly together. This is what the caul looked like when I took it apart. So using cork wasn’t a great idea, especially as the cork was a load of crap. The dark coloured bits are a lot harder than the rest, so when I clamped it up nice and tight the hard bits were forced into the maple and the surface looked as if someone had stepped on it with hobnailed boots. I was so disgusted that, again, the thought of taking photos didn’t even enter my head. There’s a method of getting dents out of wood, but I’d only used it (and heard of its being used) on spruce and cedar soundboards, I suppose because they’re what get dented the most easily. But I tried it, and it worked, but again I didn’t take any photos. So I thought I’d show you using that little off-cut I used as a bending trial. I matched the off-cut up with the caul, then put it in the vice and squeezed it up hard. When I took it out, this is what it looked like. Then I plugged in my soldering iron and let it warm up. This one works well because it has a flat oval tip. I then took a piece of kitchen paper, folded it into four, wet it and squeezed out most of the water. When the iron was hot, I placed the damp kitchen paper over a dent and pressed the hot iron onto the paper. This creates steam which is blasted into the wood fibres and swells them. You do this to all the dents, using a fresh spot on the damp paper each time, and this is the result. You can see slight marks where the deepest dents were, but very little sanding was needed to get rid of them. So, after all that, this is what the back of the headstock looked like.

The next job was to fit the backstrap or rear headstock veneer. First I needed to take the headstock down to its finished thickness by removing the bulk of the material on the bandsaw. Then I sanded it down to finished thickness on my home made ‘Luthier’s Friend’. This was before I got an oscillating spindle sander. Here it is finished. I made up another pair of book-matched off-cuts as seen earlier on in this saga and trimmed them to a rectangular shape big enough to cover the rear of the headstock. (No photo). The book-matched veneer is 1/16” (1.5mm) thick, so it’s not going to follow that curve without some help. Below is a simple bending iron. It’s a piece of steel tube with a 150w halogen bulb inside it. It has the bottom of a Coke tin wedged in the top; partly to keep the heat in and partly so it doesn’t blind me when I switch it on. I plugged it in and let it heat up and then did a test on the little piece of maple you can see in the photo. The result was quite good. The curve wasn’t quite perfect but could easily be persuaded to match the curve of the headstock. So then I went ahead and bent my book-matched piece. This bent quite willingly too, but then I noticed that where it was bent the glue line had separated and the two halves had shrunk away from each other by about 1/16”! I didn’t take any photos. I almost threw it away and started again by trying to find an off-cut big enough to make a one-piece veneer, but the other off-cuts have quite a lot of staining and aren’t very pretty. So I wondered if I could salvage it. I sawed the two pieces apart and then rubbed what should have been the matching edges down on a sanding board until they met up again. Then I glued them together again. This was a bit tricky, because the veneer was already at more-or-less finished thickness. In this photo, there’s a caul and a clamp holding the flat part of the two halves in alignment. Behind that are two long tapered pieces of maple. Behind them is another block nailed to the base (but you can’t see it). By sliding the tapered pieces against each other, the two pieces of veneer are forced together. The little spring clamp is holding the ends of the curved sections in alignment, with the aid of two small cauls (you can see the one above) and the miniature clamp is forcing the curved sections together. And it worked! I was so relieved; I forgot to take any photos again.

I decided to bind the fingerboard to match the ebony ‘framing’ of the tuner block and pickups so the next thing to do was to cut the fret slots. This is when I made my fret slotting jig following the instructions given by Jeremy Fullerton on the Australia/New Zealand Luthier Forum. As you can see, the adjustable guide has 3 neodymium magnets embedded in it, so that the saw ‘sticks’ to the guide. There are 2 clamps to hold the fingerboard securely whilst the slots are cut. There’s a strip of wood attached to the saw with double-sided tape to act as a depth stop; not as easily adjusted as a fret slotting saw with adjustable depth-stop, but cheaper. Here’s the jig clamped to the bench with the fingerboard in place and the first few slots cut. There has to be some space under the guide to allow for difference in thickness of fingerboards so, to make sure the guide is perfectly aligned with each new fret line, I replace the saw with a flat scraper blade which I could slide down until it touched the fingerboard surface to check that the guide was perfectly aligned. Then I replace the scraper blade with the saw and cut the slot. Slots nearly finished. When all the slots were cut, I gave each slot a couple of swipes with a triangular section needle file. This helps when pressing the frets in and, in the event of having to take them out, makes it less likely that the barbs will cause the surface to chip out. I made some ebony binding strips (from an old ebony ruler would you believe?) and glued purfling strips of maple veneer to them. I seem to have missed a few photos here. I tapered the fingerboard, cutting most of the surplus off on the bandsaw and then using a plane and a sanding board brought it down to its finished size = width minus two thicknesses of binding. After carefully mitring the corners, I glued the bindings to the fingerboard using thin CA. Then planed and scraped the bindings flush with both sides of the fingerboard.

Exactly. I'm not sure it really needed it and it complicated things a bit, but it turned out OK

Now to move on to the headstock veneer. I started by cutting out my headstock inlay using a jeweller’s piercing saw. I think this might be gold MOP Managed it without breaking any blades or the MOP. The gold MOP is just about the same colour as the maple, so I inlaid it into a disc of darker wood to make it show up better. Then I inlaid the disc into the head plate. Before gluing the head plate on, I milled an access slot for the truss-rod. Although the colours will change with finish, at the moment the head plate looks almost the same colour as the mahogany, so I sandwiched a dyed black veneer between the head plate and the head when gluing it in place. You can’t see it; it’s in the shadow. I then made a truss-rod cover from a bit of the headstock veneer. As you can see, it’s held in place by a couple of small neodymium magnets. The magnets don’t quite touch the truss-rod nut, which means the cover is constantly being pulled against the plate and shouldn’t rattle. Here it is in place.

Now I cut the slots for the carbon fibre stiffening bars. The bars are1/8” wide and ½” deep and are partially let into the fingerboard as well as the neck. As the neck is mostly light weight mahogany, I thought it might be a good idea to stiffen it as much as possible, hence the ½” deep CF. I’ve usually used 1/8” x 3/8” CF but two ½” deep bars are 2.37 times more resistant to bending than two 3/8” bars. I stuck the fingerboard blank to a piece of plywood exactly he same width as the neck blank, using double sided tape. This ensured that the slots in the fingerboard matched those in the neck blank exactly. Here the slots have been cut and one of the CF bars is in place being marked for cutting off the surplus. Here it is marked. Here are both bars, trimmed and in place. You may have noticed that the line where the face of the headstock intersects with the face of the neck is at right angles to the neck’s centre-line and not parallel to the first fret. That’s because I decided not to skew the headstock as most people do on multi-scale headstocks. There’s another way of dealing with the problem. First I cut a piece of the off-cut from the surplus which was cut off the other end of the neck blank. This was then glued onto the surface of the neck, overlapping slightly the neck/headstock intersection and the nut position. I then planed it down flush with the surface of the headstock. This photo is taken from the other side as it shows the result more clearly. The difference between this method and the skewed headstock is that the surface of the headstock veneer will be closer to the top of the nut on the treble side than on the bass side, but it shouldn’t be close enough to cause a problem.

Next job is to cut the slot for the truss rod. This was the first version of a rudimentary router table. There’s a hole drilled through other end of the ‘fence’ and the ‘table’ with a dowel pin in it so the fence can swivel. Fine adjustment is made at this end of the fence by tapping it with a hammer.As the slot doesn’t run through at either end, I put pencil marks on the fence and the neck to show me where to start and stop the slot. Slot cut. I forgot to take a photo, but there was some surplus length at the other end of the neck blank so when setting up I did short trial cuts at that end. I then moved the blank onto the milling machine to widen out the end of the slot for the adjustment nut. I could have fiddled about and done it with the router but it was easier on the milling machine. I cut the slot 2mm deeper than the depth of the truss rod to allow for a filet to be glued in on top of it. Here’s the rod snugly sitting in its slot. At this point I decided that the truss-rod wasn’t in the right position so I modified the slots to bring the adjustment nut further up into the headstock. You can see the difference in this photo and the next one. Next I made a strip of mahogany to glue in on top of the truss-rod. See the difference in the position of the rod? Trimming the filet down flush with the surface of the neck blank.

As I was trying to keep the instrument as light as possible I decided to make the neck from mahogany with a couple of walnut laminations and carbon fibre stiffening bars. I’d bought two mahogany billets 4” x 4” x 39” a few years before and one of them was a lot lighter in weight (and colour) than the other, so I used some of the lighter one. The walnut was from a reclaimed fire surround and it must be at least 150 years since it was a tree. Here’s the neck blank all sliced up and glued together again. My usual sort of scarf joint 1. Bandsaw a piece off. 2. Move it round to the back. 3. Glue it back on. The holes are for brass dowels to keep it aligned when gluing and are outside the finished headstock area. Here it is, glued. It’s the equivalent of a neck and headstock cut out of one piece of wood, although probably stronger because of the glued joint, but without wasting a lot of precious wood. A lot of people don’t like one piece neck/heads, especially when the truss-rod adjustment is at the head, and quote the number of Gibsons that have been broken. Should you build an instrument to withstand being dropped on its head? (They didn’t break on their own). Anyway, this one will have a volute, which should strengthen it up, and the carbon fibre reinforcement bars in the neck will run up through the neck/head junction so I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. I then trimmed the surplus off the front of the headstock the old-fashioned way. I know that not everyone has hand-tool skills but, honestly, with a little practice and a well-sharpened blade it’s not that difficult, and it’s a hell of a lot quicker than setting up router jigs, etc. Action shot There’s something really satisfying about producing shavings with hand tools. All cleaned up.

Although the shape of the covers follows the progression of the ‘fan’ and the spread of the strings, the pickups themselves only need a rectangular space which allows me to glue in reinforcement at each end. I made these from an off-cut of alder from the body. After sanding the block until it just slid into one of the pickup covers, and the end until it matched the angle, the shape of the block was drawn onto it leaving some spare at the end. Then a hole for a brass threaded insert was drilled all the way through. These inserts don’t screw in. They’re made for soft plastics and are just pressed in. The easiest way is to use one of the screws with the head cut off. Screw the insert onto the screw thread and fix the thread in the drill chuck. And press! The surplus was left on the end to prevent the wood from breaking out at this point (which it did on the first trial piece!). I also wicked a drop of thin CA around each insert. The surplus is then cut off and the end sanded and the piece trimmed to length. I then cut and fit another piece of the book-matched top wood into the rebate in the top of the covers, but I forgot to take any photos. The blocks were then glued in place, again using CA. After that I sanded a 3mm radius around all the corners and put several coats of Liberon finishing oil on them. When that had had time to harden I sent them off to Aaron Armstrong to have pickups made and fitted, and this is what they looked like when they came back.

Thanks for the kind words Biz. Someone said "Building guitars isn't rocket science, it's harder than that". But it isn't really. It's mostly just cutting bits of wood up and gluing them together.

The first step was to cut another piece off that lump of ebony and transform this into 4 strips each with a small rebate along one edge. Each strip was cut into over-size lengths and the ends bevelled one corner at a time to create a mitre joint. To make sure my mitred corners were accurate I checked them on a print of the drawing. I designed the pickups to follow the progression of the fanned frets and the ends are parallel to the outer strings; so, not only are the pickups different lengths, none of the corners have the same angle. Once the first corner was done, I started on the next corner but leaving the length over-size. Once I got the angle right I could then reduce the length of the piece between first and second corners to its correct length and start on the third corner, etc., etc. I then simply super-glued the pieces together. If you have perfectly mating surfaces it makes a surprisingly strong joint. I know this because of the effort it took to get one apart when I got the angle wrong. Here are the two frames glued up.

I took one of the off-cuts and sliced it up. These are some of the slices. Here’s a book-matched pair. After jointing, gluing up, sanding and wiping with alcohol to show up the figure, this is what it looked like. Now I could go back and finish the tuner block cover. Although I don’t have any photos of the process, I milled out a shallow recess in the cover about 1.5mm deep and glued in a book-matched piece of the maple body wood. The final operation was to plane and sand a 3mm radius round the top edge of the cover. Pickup covers next.

Yes, it is.

So now I needed to make a start on the body. I’d had the top wood for about 7 or 8 years but got distracted by another project each time I should have started on it. It’s figured maple and about 7/8” thick. The other body wood is alder from a French supplier and is in one piece. The alder was about 1”1/4 thick so I had to make a router sled to take it down to 7/8” but I’m afraid I didn’t take any photos of that. As half the body is maple and I wanted to keep the weight down as much as possible I decided to hollow it out wherever possible. So here I am, making a start with a Forstner bit. Then cleaning up with the router. Here the cavities have all been routed. And the body profile cut out leaving about 2 to 3 mm extra all round. The cavities vary in depth to allow for the carving on the outside of the body. Here’s a photo of just about every clamp I owned at the time. And this is what it looked like when the clamps came off.