bradleyjere

Well, after a long time of not having time to work on my guitar I am back at it! My wife and I had our first baby and that has proved to be a time intensive activity... I sorted out the neck issue with another thread and ended up going with the advise that the majority of people gave me. I used a bandsaw to remove the "ears" off the headstock. I left just a slight amount of wood so I wouldn't need to plane down the entire neck length. Then I sanded the remainder off each side to get back to a nice flat and parallel situation. After marking the elevation and headstock angle of the neck from my templates I used the band saw to rough cut the top of the headstock angle. Then I was able to sand that surface to my marked line with very nice results. Then I rough cut the rest of the elevation leaving about a quarter inch of material except for the heel. (I have not decided on the details of the heel so I am leaving that alone for now.) I tried to use the same sander to sand down the back of the headstock but the shape of the neck and the type of sander makes the sandpaper unsupported in the area I need to remove. So I wasn't getting very good results. I stopped while I still had some wood to work with and I'm back to figuring out my next step. I also ran the body through the thickness sander a few times to thin it up a bit. I brought it down to 1.8" (It was just shy of 2.0" before). I wanted to leave a little stock since I still am not clear on how thick the body should be. So, here is the one picture I took of the neck to show where it's at. I didn't bother taking any in process pictures.

Melvyn, I want to add my thanks for this incredible book. I have purchased my own copy of it and I reference it on a continual basis! I urge anyone who is really interested in building their own guitar to purchase this book as it truly is a bible of information. I agree with post from PTU 7's. I have not seen your book anywhere as an ebook, just the Kotch one. If I do see it being offered someplace I will let you know!

Thanks MiKro and Blackdog! Well, I think that I am just going to keep working on the body for now. I've been so busy with the new baby that I have not had any time to really consider how to proceed on the neck. Rather than doing anything in haste I'll just stick to the process that I am sure about!

Hey everyone! I haven't meant to ignore your latest posts in this topic but I've been a bit tied up this past week. My wife and I have just had our first baby so I have not had ANY time for anything else! (Her name is Ariana and she was born October 30th. She is the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen!) Anyway, I'll be looking over the latest posts soon and deciding which way I am going to proceed. I hope to be doing more work on Wednesday but if I can't decide what to do on the neck I'll just work on the body some more.

Setch, Thank you for your description of runout in relationship to wood. I thought you were referring to it in the sense of GD&T. I do understand the concept of the wood fibers running along the long axis of the board I just didn't know the terminology. So really, there are two main points that we are talking about. Strength and time. Strength: I am still confused as to what you are suggesting. In the first sentence you say that a one piece headstock IS strong but not as strong as it could be. Are you inferring that by gluing the ears on before cutting the angle I am going to weaken the entire headstock? Or are you trying to suggest that a scarf joint neck construction is superior to a one piece? Time: I am still failing to see why this is driving 5 miles out of my way to avoid turning around. What I see is that I take a bit of time (no longer than removing the ears) to make it possible to work with this condition. Please tell me what I am missing in regards to all this time that I will waste if I use this method!

Thanks, that makes perfect sense to me! I am doing a hardtail so I'll start just behind the bridge. By the way, looking at my PRS I can totally see this angle now. Just a small detail that never stood out to me before!

Thanks for your replies Setch, Rich and Mattia! I appreciate the time that you have both taken to think about and write your responses! I do agree that taking steps back will sometimes be the best route to take. I am a mechanical designer and have worked closely with manufacturing teams in quite a few major companies so I do understand the ins and outs of process management. That being said I again acknowledge that I am a newbie woodworker and guitar builder so I will never claim to know better than anyone else. (Please don't take offense at this next section. I am not trying to be argumentative. I am honestly stating things as I a see them and asking if I am missing something!) Am I missing part of the process that is yet to come and the difficulties that the path of not removing the ears will create? As I understand it, the downside to not removing the ears is that there is a potential lose of strength. I know that there will be tuning machine holes that will be put in this area and potentially pass through part of the join. As a mechanical designer I am assuming that wood that I glued on is just as strong as the main neck and the glue joint itself is stronger than the wood. The surfaces that were glued together both had zero runout so the join itself is perfectly flush. The grain runs in the same direction but opposes the main neck wood. When I cut the angle on the main neck wood I am automatically creating a condition where the grain no longer runs parallel to the neck shaft, so I don't see how there is a strength advantage to gluing on wood that runs parallel to the headstock angle. If I cut it with the ears glued on I at least have the grain opposing itself in the same orientation. Are there other parts of the guitar building process that I will have to deal with where the ears being glued on now will make it more difficult? Again, I completely agree that there are times when backtracking is essential to being successful. Thanks again!

That looks like a great tool hooglebug! Thanks for posting the link to your thread on this topic, I would have gone crazy trying to find it!

I think this makes perfect sense. I like this idea because it doesn't involve prying or cutting of the wood that I've glued. Thanks! I used "hefty" ears because I didn't want to try and guess where I needed to glue the wood. I planned on covering the whole area and then I was sure to have it covered. Next time I will be gluing the ears on afterwards! Thanks! I hope that I didn't make it sound like I was doing a neck through guitar! This is a PRS style glued on neck. But I agree that things need to be planned out ahead of time to avoid working around issues like this. Neck through or not! Thanks! The grain of the wood that I glued on is straight. It's grain is actually opposing the grain in the main piece just like others suggest doing to make the main neck stable. So I am pretty sure the join will be strong enough. Thanks! I like everyones ideas and thanks for your replies! I don't feel that I need to go backwards and take another approach but rather work with the situation and keep moving forward. Not that I am going to rush this process but I only have 1 day a week for 2 hours to work on this project right now. Going back like that would be a full session spent and I don't think there is enough advantage to justify it.

I like the router idea, I'll have to look up the thread that gives the details. I am not clear how you accomplish this with a hand plane. By the way, I am still not clear on where the angle starts. It appears that it is right around where the bridge sits. I'll have to look at my guitar when I get home to see if I can get a better idea on this! Do you happen to know of a thread that debates this issue? I would love to read through it and see all the details rather than ask you to type them all up again! By the way, what is the best way to machine the neck angle in the pocket? A similar set up like above with a router on angled rails?

Wow, thanks for all the replies guys! I want to say up front here that it's great to hear all the different ideas. As a newbie woodworker and guitar builder I acknowledge that I have a lot to learn! I will try to evaluate every suggestion before I make my final decisions. Please don't be offended if I chose to not use yours! I completely understand the angled top now. I own a PRS C22 and have played it for years but I never realized that angle was there. I have not decided at this point if I will do the angle or leave it flat. Is the angle part of the carving process? How do you go about making that feature? I know that it looks like I am wasting a lot of wood on the neck but trust me, it will get used in future projects! An idea that someone had for me in the thread I created for this problem suggested gluing on additional scrap wood to make the sides all the same level. Then I can mark the elevation profile off my template once again. I am intending to achieve my neck angle using the heel of the neck. The templates I have allow the fretboard surface to be completely flat. So the neck taper should not be effected at all. For the headstock veneer I can see that there are a lot of options and I will have to think about which way I want to go. I will have to step back from the details and consider the project as a whole to make my decision. I can say for sure that I will not be using the black limba as the veneer but I will probably use it to make the truss rod cover instead. So I just need to decide if I will leave the headstock as mahogany or use the same wood as the fretboard. Again, my options are purple heart or rosewood. Capu, that is a very beautiful guitar you made there! Congratulations on a job well done!

That is an idea for sure. I would have to make the new surface flat and square to the fretboard surface. This could take quite a bit of extra time as I only get to work once a week in the wood shop. Thanks for the input!

So I have an interesting problem that I ran into on my neck construction. I have heard many times about needing to glue on extra wood to the headstock area to get enough width. When I started to work on my neck I did not have my template yet so I wasn't aware that I was going to need to to this. So now I have this extra wood glued on and I have no idea how to proceed with cutting the headstock angle! Here are the issues: 1) The wood I added was only perfectly flush on the gluing surface. Now the outer surfaces are not square to anything. Not cool as these are the surfaces that I see as needing to run against a machine table while I cut. 2) With this extra wood in the way it is impossible for me to mark the line from template for the headstock angle. So, any ideas on how I should proceed? Do I need to make some sort of jig or does anyone have a clever technique that I could use? I would appreciate any ideas. Thanks! (I know it's kind of hard to tell what I'm talking about with these pictures. I'll try making a CAD drawing to illustrate it better.)

I'm not sure what you mean by angle the top. Right now the body is just shy of 2" thick so I have plenty of material for carving. I will probably do the traditional PRS carve but I'll probably get an inexpensive piece of scrap wood to practice on first! I agree that it would look odd to have the grain run perpendicular. I do have the option that I could bookmatch the piece of stock and then I can get the grain to run parallel with the body. That piece of stock is 2" thick as well so there is plenty of wood to work with. Oh yeah, it is very satisfying to hit these milestones! When I needed to get the extra wood out of the neck to make it wide enough for the headstock I had a glimpse of that feeling because all of a sudden the rough piece of wood had a very slight neck shape. I am really looking forward to the entire process! I'm not sure how it would look to use the same wood as the fingerboard. That is an interesting thought though, I'll have to think about it! But if I do go with a veneer I want it glued on before I cut the headstock out. I think it would be a huge pain to cut it exactly and glue it properly.

Today I discovered an difficult obstacle with the neck. When I glued the ears onto the headstock last week, I did not take the time to mark my headstock angle on the wood first. Now I don't know how to cut the headstock angle. So because of that I moved back to working on the body. I wasn't going to take any chances trying something hastily. I am going to start a new thread in Solid Body Guitar and Bass Chat to get some ideas! I cut out the profile of the guitar on the band saw. I took my time and tried to get close to the line so I wouldn't have a lot of routing to do. When I went to route the profile I discovered that the cut was not as vertical as I would like. About one half of the thickness has material to route away while the other half falls away. So I will use an oscillating spindle sander to smooth it all out. It won't be exactly to my template anymore, but I am not concerned as long as it looks natural. I was able to get a piece of black limba out of the scrap that is big enough for me to make a headstock veneer out of. The only issue is that it is not long enough for me to have the grain run in the same direction as the body. I am not sure if it will look okay if I have the grain run perpendicular to the body or some other random angle though. Anybody have any thoughts on that? One other little thing I did is improve on my template registration idea. I realized that the screws I used had heads that stuck up above the template surface. If I left them like that I would have run into them with the router base. I removed those screws and replaced them with countersunk screws that lie just below the template surface. I redid the holes with a countersink bit and used some sand paper afterwards to get rid of the rough edges. By the way, what do you all think I should use for my fretboard? I am going to go with either purple heart or rosewood. So, that's what I got done tonight. It is rather satisfying to have the body shaped wood now. It feels like I am actually working on a guitar!

I completely agree that they have no reason to make these easy or cheap for people to get. This is their own design and they want people to purchase one of their guitars if they like what they do. I didn't realize that you just got a price quote yesterday! Well, I am not spending $200 for one of their bridges! Thanks for the info Mattia!

Do you happen to know what online place carried them? I am curious if they are still that expensive and also to see if I can hunt down another supplier. Otherwise I am leaning towards the Tonepros AVT2 wraparound bridge. Does anybody have experience with the Tonepros bridge that can comment on if it's worth the extra money?

Thanks for the info on the bridges guys, I do appreciate it! I will have to investigate what direction I want to take with that for sure. I agree that $200 isn't worth getting an actual PRS bridge! By the way, if anyone is looking for a specific dimension of the Mcarty, I do have the templates from guitarbuildingtemplates.com. These are useless for body thickness information but great in all other respects! I measured the heel of the neck at it thickets point and it is 1.745" thick. This dimension does not include the fingerboard so I don't know if it's what you were looking for!

I pretty much figured that the pickup and electronic pockets were not set in stone but I wanted to be sure. Thanks for the body thickness dimension! I'll go with that unless someone disagrees with your number. I guess I am not all that concerned with going with the exact same model that they use. I suppose the better question is if there is any difference between brands of stop tail bridges for the installation? Or is this an industry standard? Thanks again Hector!

I am in process of building my first guitar, a PRS Mcarty. I have been trying to find if this info has been posted anywhere else already but I can't find it! I need the specs for the following items: Body thickness = Depth of pick up pockets = Depth of electronics pockets = Model of stop tail bridge that PRS uses = So if anybody could help with these I would greatly appreciate it!

I am hoping to do something similar but I don't know if it worked yet. When I drilled the template for the bridge pick up I made a sandwich out of the pick up blanks hoping to be able to either switch the blanks or use the same blank with the neck routing template. But I agree that if this works out like the theory says it will, I will have a dead accurate guide for routing! I am glad that someone else has used a similar method and been successful. It tells me I'm not crazy! Thanks for the positive comments capu and CrazyManAndy!

Okay, I made a little bit of progress today! I took my neck wood that I glued together and sanded down the face that will receive the fretboard. When I laid out the neck using my template I discovered that I had not accounted for the little "wings" that are on a PRS headstock. Not a big deal, I cut some extra material out of what will be the scrap part of the neck and glued a piece to each side of where the head will be located. Here are some pictures of my glue job. I know it looks sloppy but I'm not concerned at this point because most of this wood is getting cut away. Also, the wood is a little wet because I wiped some of the excess glue off. After that I had just enough time to get the template on the body and mark the profile that I will use when I band saw. I included a few black and white pics because I think it shows the grain better than the color shots. There is one thing that I did that I think is going to work out really great! I used the pieces of the template that get removed for routing the pickup cavities and drilled two holes through each of them. After I had the template positioned just right I ran a few screw through the holes into the body wood. Now I can remove the template and cut the profile with the band saw and then put the template back exactly where it came from for routing! It works just like a puzzle. I don't know if anybody else has done it this way but I think it's pretty slick.

Yes, I did run them through a jointer. That gap was not really there though. I took this picture just laying the wood out on the floor and if I held them together they were nearly perfect. But I wasn't going to take any chances!

Okay, I got my templates from guitarbuildingtemplates.com and I am very pleased with them! I also received my truss rod and that looks really good too. Since I am working out of the high school wood shop once a week I don't have any more progress, but I did want to post pics of the black limba billet. It doesn't have as much flame as some of the other examples I've seen, but I still think it's beautiful wood.

So, I finally am getting going on my first build! This has been a very long process for me as I have been trying to get a workshop put together in my garage. Complicated by my wife and I expecting our first baby (Due October 23rd!!!) Anyway, I am excited to get going on this as I have been chomping at the bit for about a year and a half! I am doing most of the work at our local high school wood shop because they have a 10 week "class" that allows people from the community to use it so that is pretty sweet. They have every tool I could possibly need! And hopefully my garage workshop will be Anyway, down to details. I am doing a PRS style using Mcarty templates. The body is going to be all black limba. I have not decided if I will try to carve the top or leave it as a flat top. I saw the new guitar from PRS that is the Mira and it is mostly a flat top with a few simple carved areas so I might do some sort of hybrid of that. The neck is going to be Honduras mahogany with either a birds eye maple or rosewood fretboard. I don't have my headstock veneer picked out yet but that will be decided after I choose the fretboard. I am going with the double action welded nut truss rod from Luthiers Mercantile. For my tailpiece I will be using some form of stop tail, but I have not picked one out yet. Does anyone know what PRS uses? I don't want to do a tune-o-matic bridge, I want to keep it fairly simple. I don't have any of the electronics picked out yet. What I have completed so far: Glued the black limba together to make my body blank and then ran it through a thickness sander to make it nice and uniform on both sides. Cut the mahogany in half, turned one piece around and glued it back together to make it more stable. As soon as I have my templates and truss rod I will be able to really get going! I will post pictures as often as I can. I appreciate any feedback or advice that you guys have!