Dave Higham

No, I'm afraid I have to make do with Worcestershire Sauce. 'Tin't the same though.

Eyup Prof. I see you're in the Peak District. From the age of 5 to 45 I was a Sheffielder. Still am really Here goes then. A view of the arm bevel. And one of the 'Manzer' wedge body. That's all folks! If you have been, thanks for watching.

I suppose I ought to show some photos of the finished article?

Thanks for your comments Biz.

Now came the moment of truth and I couldn’t put it off any longer. Gluing the bridge. I made a clamping caul as shown. It consists of a piece of 12mm ply with two threaded inserts and two Allen screws. Behind that there’s the off-cut from the bridge with a piece of thick card attached with double sided tape as a sort of cushion. Behind that are two brass dowels which allow me to align this lot with the bridge itself when I actually come to glue it in place. Assembled, it looks like this. The ebony off-cut is so thin in the middle that it’s very flexible, and, once I’ve clamped the caul in the centre I can apply pressure to the ends by turning the two screws. Again, it’s a sort of home-made version of what Stewmac sells. This was a dry run. After measuring and checking 3 or 4 times I scribed round the bridge and scraped the finish off. Not my favourite job, using one of those single sided razor blades as a scraper. I then applied several layers of masking tape around the bridge as a tape-dam and glued it on. I didn’t take any photos… I was a bit too busy. All that remained was to make a nut, using another home-made tool to hold the nut and then screw all the bits together. One or two problems cropped up. Even with the two neck levelling screws lowered almost as far as they could go (so the neck almost bottomed out in the body recess) it was still 13-and-a-bit frets to the body and it was supposed to be 13. Obviously I miscalculated somewhere. But the other problem turned out to be a sort of blessing in disguise. Even after all the measuring and checking, with the neck adjustment as far towards the bridge as it would go, I still had too much intonation. i.e. the bridge was too far from the neck. So I had to deepen the recess in the neck block which was a bit nerve-wracking as the body was finished. Anyway, in the end, when the intonation was as good as I could get it, the 13th fret turned out to be in line with the body junction, which I put down gratefully to beginner’s luck. So I finally got it strung up and I could hear what it sounded like. Well, at least it didn’t sound like a banjo. I hear people describing a guitar’s sound with terms like ‘sparkling trebles’, ‘shimmering mids’, ‘growling bass’, etc. and it just doesn’t mean a thing to me. Probably because I’m not a guitarist. But some months later, on a trip to the UK, I gave it to my nephew who was suitably gobsmacked and, in his hands, it sounded rather good to me. So all was well that ended well.

I then cut out the profile and countersunk the pin holes. Countersink bits have tendency to wander if the surface being countersunk isn’t perpendicular to the axis of the bit and the workpiece isn’t clamped down. So to avoid this I is clamped a board to the drill press table and drilled a hole in the board for a locating pin the same diameter as the holes in the bridgePhoto Then I located the bridge on the pin to countersink the holes. And here it is finished. To match the underside of the bridge to the surface of the soundboard, the usual method is to tape sandpaper to the soundboard and rub the bridge on it, but you can’t press too hard and it takes an eternity. So I made a sanding board by sanding a piece of ¾” MDF in the radius dish to form a convex surface and sticking some 80-grit abrasive to it. I used this until all the surface of the bridge was in contact with it and then finished of with some 400 grit paper on the soundboard. Only a few fiddly jobs to do now, one of which is drilling the holes for the tuners. I already had 5mm pilot holes drilled using the template, which I had to open up to 10mm diameter. To do this I used a similar method to that for drilling the bridge pin holes. I drilled a 5 mm hole in the base board and inserted a brass dowel which was a nice sliding fit, and then changed the 5mm drill bit for a 10mm brad point bit. I then located the headstock on the dowel and lowered the 10mm bit which pushed the dowel down and drilled a clean 10mm hole concentric with the 5mm one. So now I have 6 nice clean holes waiting for the tuners.

I agree.

After quite a lot of sanding I could start on the finishing. I finally decided to do the neck in Tru-Oil and the body in French polish. Here I’m starting on the body and it’s beginning to shine. While I’m applying zillions of coats of Tru-Oil and shellac I can make the bridge, so I had to saw another piece off my lump of ebony. That involved quite a lot of perspiration as the saw isn’t as sharp as it used to be. Once I’d got my blank squared up I started on the saddle slot. The advantage in using CAD is that having drawn the bridge with the compensated saddle slot, I could draw two tapered cauls at the same angle as the slot. Stick the drawing onto a bit of ¾” MDF and sand up to the lines and my blank is held perfectly at the correct angle. While it’s in there I can drill the pin holes too. After sawing off the surplus on the bandsaw I sanded a curve onto the top surface. The two triangular blocks are attached with double sided tape and help me keep hold of the bridge and keep it square to the sanding belt. After which it looked like this.

Gluing an ebony heel cap. I make the heel cap its finished shape and blend the heel into it. I then carved the neck and completely forgot about taking photos. This seems to happen when I’m concentrating on the job in hand. This photo shows how the two brass plugs that sit on the neck adjustment screws are aligned with the centre of the barrel nut holding the neck in place. This means that, in theory, the neck can tilt backwards or forwards without loosening the barrel bolt. We’ll see if it works. Having got the neck to this stage, I can start fitting it to the body, and to do that I have to cut the aperture in the top for the neck extension. I was going to make a router template but finished up just carefully cutting it with chisels etc. This shows the beginning of the aperture for the neck heel. Once this was done I could fit the neck by engaging the holes in the neck’s brass plugs with the points on the adjustment screws and carefully scribing around the heel with a craft knife. I then opened up the recess until the heel just fit into it. After some slow and careful chisel work.

Binding the fretboard. Has anyone had any experience of CA glue deteriorating? I’d been using Stewmac thin CA and I’d had the bottle for a quite a while, but I kept it in the fridge and it hadn’t thickened up, which I thought was the only way it could go off. However, it seemed to be much more reluctant to set than it used to be, and with some things it would not set at all; dyed-black veneer, for instance. Stewmac won’t send me their accelerator, so I got this one from a local model-making store but it didn’t seem to make much difference to the Stewmac CA. So I went back to the store and bought a bottle of the same brand of CA as the accelerator. What a difference! I started gluing my fingers to things again! In fact, for most things, I don’t even need the accelerator. I’ll stick with this brand now. (The pun was unintentional). Fretboard bound. Those whitish streaks are actually brown, but I don’t mind a few streaks in ebony. They make it look like wood rather than black plastic. Frets installed and fretboard glued on but I didn’t take any photos. I pressed the frets in on the drill press. I used a Stewmac 16” rad. caul and made a holder for it. Some things that Stewmac sells for a lot of money, you can make yourself for next to nothing.

Oh well, never mind. Can you see that little slope I’ve chiselled into the cover recess? Well, that lets me get it out. Like this. Of course I’ll probably have to loosen the D and G strings, but I never said it was perfect! Now for the fretboard. I don’t have a template for the fret spacing so I just measured and marked using the Stewmac calculator I made the fret slotting jig for two fanned fret basses I made, but it obviously works just as well for parallel frets. After all the slots were cut I ran a triangular section needle file along them a couple of times to create a slight chamfer. It helps the frets go in and reduces the chances of chipping if they ever have to come out again. Sanding the radius on the fretboard. Action shot.

The binding isn’t going to bend to fit the three tight radii without some help, so this is what I do. (I may have shown this before. As these are regurgitated threads, I’m not quite sure. Anyway, I make a couple of male and female forms from MDF. Then I drop a piece of binding in boiling water for a couple of minutes, fish it out, and clamp it between the two forms. Then I put the whole lot into the oven on the lowest setting for about ten minutes and when it comes out and cools down it keeps the shape perfectly. The two long pieces bend easily enough, but with the help of another form I glue the purfling to them and they almost keep their intended shape too. The one on the left is one of the pieces for the curve where the headstock meets the neck. The one on the right is for the end of the headstock. This is the second one I made because on the first one I glued the purfling on the convex side like all the others! (eyeroll). As someone said “I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes, and I’ll probably learn some more”. Here are all the bits glued together. I didn’t take any photos of myself gluing my fingers to it. Been there, done that. Have you noticed a difference in the truss rod cover? Here are all the bits glued together. I didn’t take any photos of myself gluing my fingers to it. Been there, done that. Have you noticed a difference in the truss rod cover? So I had to thicken the cover with a piece of maple with a hole in it which allowed me to glue a magnet solidly to it, and bevelled the edges so that, although it’s not as discrete as I wanted, it still blends in. I then, of course had to glue another magnet into the headstock like so. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the cover is lined up with its recess, but that the magnet in the cover is slightly nearer the nut than the one in the headstock. This means that the magnet in the headstock pulls the cover up into its recess. I wasn’t sure it would really work, but it does. At this point I hoped someone was going to say ‘But how will you get it out?’ but if you’ve seen it before, you’ll know.

Stumped me for a minute. Did you mean marquetry?

Now I can cut most of the surplus off the headstock. It looks a bit hairy doing it this way but it works OK if you’re careful. There! It looks like a headstock. You’ve noticed that part of the ‘decoration’ is missing. Well, how else was I going to get at the truss rod? I decided to make a flush fitting cover that wouldn’t be seen as such, so part of the ‘decoration’ wasn’t glued to the rest. Now I can route the headstock’s finished shape with the help of a template and locating pins It’s going to be a bound headstock so I need to route a ledge for the binding and purfling. I always have problems with this as, when you get to the corners, there’s less than a quarter of the router base in contact with the headstock surface and the slightest wobble cuts a divot in the ledge. So after I’d finished I made another base for the Dremel. That way, I won’t be tempted to try it again with the Stewmac base next time. Now I have a nice clean ledge for the binding and purfling.

I like your headstock. I suppose because I made this one about 18 years ago.

My pleasure!

Mmm . . . got bogged down a bit by various things including a (very mild) dose of the plague, but I’ll try to make more progress. Remember what the tail graft looked like? I decided to make a headstock ‘decoration’ to match. Oh, and this is why the tail graft got installed ‘upside-down’. I didn’t do it intentionally, I just got used to seeing them like this and installed the tail graft without thinking about it and although you can’t really see them both at the same time, in this case it does seem like the ‘right’ way up to me. Here I’m routing a recess for my pearl logo with the home-made pantograph. It actually works surprisingly well So then I glued the headstock veneer on, cut off some of the surplus and it looked like this. Off-cuts from the back to make a bookmatched backstrap veneer. It looks as if I used fish glue. I cut most of the surplus off on the bandsaw and then sanded the back of the headstock to thickness. These are the bits that are going to be glued onto it. Bending the maple veneer on a hot pipe is easy. Bending a bookmatched veneer 2mm thick isn’t. Of course it came apart, I’d used fish glue hadn’t I, and how do you get things apart that have been glued with fish glue? But I managed to glue it together again and it doesn’t show much. And here it’s getting glued in place. Voilà! (Yes, it’s voilà, not viola; that’s a sort of oversized fiddle).

Before gluing the CF bars in, I needed to route the slot for the truss-rod. I didn’t get that wrong ‘cos it’s in the middle. Here it is with the rod being tried for size. It’s an Allied rod and they recommend gluing a fillet on top of it, so I made the fillet and masked off the face of the neck blank to reduce the chance of getting glue where I didn’t want it. Then I glued it in. Once glued, I skimmed the fillet down flush with the surface of the neck. Having built mostly electric basses and frequented the bass forums I find it amazing the lengths to which some people will go, building complicated jigs to do everything with a router; especially scarf-jointed headstocks. I just love using a plane with a sharp blade. I had to glue a couple of wings onto the headstock and they’re glued on like this to match the grain direction of the rest. Then they got planed down flush to the headstock front.

Perhaps I didn't explain earlier. The neck will be fully adjustable. The neck block has two threaded inserts with two pointed grub screws with the screws pointing towards the neck. The holes in the two brass plugs, which you can see a bit further up and which will be glued into the neck, sit on the points of the grub screws. This allows the neck to be adjusted 'sideways' so the centre line of the neck can be aligned with the centre of the bridge. The neck can also tilt backwards and forwards on the brass plugs to adjust the action and this is controlled by a screw through the heel going into a barrel nut, also located in the neck block. What had to be predetermined was the positions of the above relative to the neck and body, so as to be able to adjust the neck to give more than enough string height without the end of the fingerboard hitting the body. Does any of that make sense? It gave me a headache!

Got a bit distracted by other things, anyway, here's a bit more. Milling the recess for the neck extension to support the cantilevered fingerboard. The neck extension glued in place. I thought I’d make it out of something stiff and maple was the stiffest wood I’d got. Afterwards, I realised it would have looked better in mahogany as it will be partially seen. I now had to route slots for the carbon fibre stiffening bars and the truss rod. I decided to add two short lengths of CF bars as extra stiffening for the neck extension. The blocks of MDF are improvised stops on the improvised router table. I let the bars into the fingerboard. Here they are, being tried for size. Yes, people have told me I’ll never be able to get the fingerboard off again, but I don’t ever intend to. Now then, for those of you who haven’t yet been bored comatose by the length of this saga, are you still awake enough to have noticed the glaring mistake I made? Yes, of course, the short pieces of CF should be on the OUTSIDE!!! After giving it the good old anglo-saxon four-letter-word treatment I went back to the drawing board and decided that I should just get away with it if I took care carving the neck. Good job Daniel didn’t want a V-profile. That would probably have meant starting again. So onward and upwards (hopefully) and trim the other ends of the long bars.

I added two carbon fibre tubes to reinforce the heel. Drilling the hole for the (barrel) bolt after having cut the tenon and drilled the hole for the barrel nut. The piece of dowel was a force-in fit which means no break-out when the drill goes through the barrel nut hole. Here’s what it looks like with the hardware in place. I now have to drill the holes for the two brass plugs that sit on the adjustment screws. I started by making this little jig. The holes are drilled on accurate centres in the milling machine and the slot is being cut to just slide onto the tenon. Here’s the jig in place on the neck tenon. and here are the holes being drilled. Of course, I forgot about the two CF tubes so they got drilled too. If I’d thought about it I’d have made the brass plugs shorter. So here it is with the brass plugs in place.

With the box closed it’s time to start on the neck. Here’s a mahogany neck blank with two strategically placed holes drilled in it for dowel pins, and a piece sawn off it. Moved the sawn-off piece round the back, inserted the dowel pins and glued it back together. I realise that this makes it the equivalent of a one-piece, Gibson-type neck, but it’s easier than a scarf joint. Then planed the headstock down to the nut line. Cut two pieces off the other end to form a heel block and thinned one of them down. Glued the two pieces together and drilled the counter-bored hole for the neck angle adjusting screw. It would be difficult or even impossible to drill the hole after the heel block is glued to the neck shaft. Also cut two slots and glued two cross grained pieces of maple in them so that the barrel bolt anchoring the neck won’t be pulling on end grain. In fact, there needn’t be much tension on the barrel bolt. The string tension holds the neck in place and the bolt is really only there to prevent the neck being bent backwards when the strings are taken off. The toothpicks are to locate the heel block when gluing. Heel block glued in place.

I know this technique is used for arm-bevel veneers but haven't tried it. Do you have to hold the veneer in place until it cools sufficiently to prevent it springing off, For binding, I've always taped it in place with gaps between the pieces of tape and a drop of water-thin CA in each gap. I also push the binding into the ledge as each drop of glue is applied. Then the tape is taken off and the whole thing flooded with CA. Seems to work OK.

Well, so far so good, in fact better than I expected. I now needed to make a template for the armrest veneer. I use this spray adhesive quite a lot. When it’s dry you can stick the paper to the wood and peel it off later. Which I did, and then stuck it to a piece of thin card. I cut it out leaving about 3mm to trim off later. I then had to find a piece of walnut big enough to cover the armrest. If I hadn’t already cut up the off-cuts from the back to use as a head stock back-strap I could have had a piece whose grain almost matched the curve of the armrest. In the end I managed to find two pieces to glue together which I thought should look OK. I glued them together and reduced the thickness to about 1.25mm (0.050”). When I cut the profile I thought I’d better err on the safe side so I added another 3mm all round. As it was more or less cross-grained it was quite flexible. I glued it on using fish glue and rather a lot of tape. I was thinking I should have tried to find an old inner tube to make an endless rubber band to hold the veneer on while gluing, but perhaps inner tubes aren’t easy to find these days. When I finally got all that tape off it looked like this. And after some VERY slow and careful work with a spokeshave and scraper, it looked like this. I realised that, when cutting the 45° bevel, I should have taken it nearer to the purfling on the top (i.e. taken more off the extra top binding) as the 50 thou veneer when trimmed at 45° leaves a surface 70 thou wide. Still, I was rather pleased with it as a first attempt. I then glued in the back bindings (profiled bindings are great!) and it’s starting to look like a guitar.

Yes @Gogzs the guitar is on a sort of cradle and the sanding contraption moves round it. I have an off-cut of melamine surfaced kitchen worktop which is nice and flat and smooth and I did it on that.