MartyM

I'll post a couple of pics this afternoon. I think you'll have a long scarf joint. Which is actually better than a short one. You have more wood to wood contact. I have an EBO half done like that.

Marty

Oh, and I have a couple Gibson Marauder necks here with scarf joints from the factory.:-)

Hi,

I've done a few of these over the last couple of years. It actually isn't as hard as it appears. I've left the fingerboard on in all the cases. First, after removing the rod nut and washer, I'd take a small thin handsaw and cut on both sides of the truss rod to expose new wood. I try to avoid the nut area if possible, but have remade the peghead with a new surface for the nut too in a couple of cases.

I have a squared up block of wood ( basswood in my case) with a channel running down the middle of it. Using carpet tape on both sides of the routed slot on the basswood block, I stick 60-80 grit cloth backed abrasive paper. This gets used as a plane on the freshly cut mahogany surfaces. The truss rod rides in the slot of the block. I sand in only one direction, trying to keep the surface straight and not hollow in the middle.

The mahogany get leveled pretty easily if your saw cuts are right on. This leaves a raised area of wood in line with the truss rod. This raised portion gets removed with a chisel and scraper. When both sides of mahogany are flat, straight, and even, I make the peghead replacement part. I try and get the grain direction the same on the new piece of mahogany. This involves cutting out a triangle shaped pc. of wood. Using abrasives, a plane, or what ever you use to true up your wood, the triangle needs a slot on the glue side and adjustment rod cavity on the peghead side. I use a forstner bit, rounded gouge and exacto knife to make the adj. rod cavity. The slot for the rod can be made on a router table.

I dry fit the peghead and make adjustments until the mating surfaces are good to go. Using many small C clamps and angled cauls, The new wood gets clamped down. Finally the peghead gets shaped, drilled, a new overlay etc.

This repair is a good test of your abilities and makes for a satisfying feeling that you've saved a guitar from the trash bin and given it another lease on life. My first few weren't perfectly square to the neck, but not horribly off either. The more of these I've done, the faster and better they have become. It's one way to make your gibson collection larger without a major capital investment.

Marty

All this talk about accuracy made me go down and do a test. With a piece of walnut double taped down to the table, I ran a 1/4 dia straight bit through the wood a little more than 1/8" deep for 4 inches in the Y axis . Then I went.75 " in the X axis. The last pass was 4 in back to the starting position in the y axis. I did this at a high rate of speed with a dull bit with no regard to grain direction or climb milling/conventional milling. The result was about an average of .480-.484 and a flawless cut should have been .500. So we are talking about .016 to .020 off at a high rate of speed. Perhaps a slower speed and sharper bit would have yielded a different result closer to the .500. I know it isn't perfect, but for a comparison, A shopbot ( 7000 dollars) has a cutting accuracy of +/- .015". and a repeatability of +/-.005". Knowing that there is this amount of error, I could theoretically adjust my inlay or cavity to make the space smaller by adjusting my offset in my Cad drawing.

It's not the be all-end all, but it was fun to build, it is fun to work with, and it works for me. Your mileage may vary as they say. I'm sure the Carvewright will work for somebody too. I'd be interested in what kind of results that can produce.

Which really is very poor accuracy. thats .015" to .030".

I am also figuring that a good portion of that error is runout on the Porter Cable Laminate trimmer over which I have no control. The above figure is also a guess. It could be less, I've never measured it other than making a test plug and a corresponding cavity to see how they would fit together. The numbers could be tweaked in the software to reduce the gap.

"Honestly....Break out your calipers and measure 30 thou... thats the width of a fret tang. You think a gap like that is acceptable in an inlay?"

That I can't address, as I'm no inlay guy, but I'm willing to bet that a gap of .015 would be pretty acceptable to somebody who does it on a regular basis. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.

In parts alone a home made cnc will cost you 2k

If you can build a guitar, you can build a CNC machine.

That may be true, but building a CNC machine with tight enough backlash tolerances for inlay work or fret slots is not easy at all.

This carvewright machine is a hobbiest machine per their website. The specs on the Carvewright FAQ do not discuss the repeatibility of the machine. This is important for the accuracy that you are referring to especially for inlay work.

Regarding backlash tolerances, by using delrin nuts and threaded rod, one can achieve nearly zero backlash. There are a few different methods for doing this.

I've looked at the Carvewright at Sears. It is a cool looking machine. My point is this, Is it worth 2000 dollars to be able to make templates and to do other work with a depth of 1 inch or less? If the answer is yes, than it should do the trick. If however you want to be able to rout a control cavity down to 1.5 inches for example than perhaps other options should be considered.

The depth of cut is only 1 in. The Sears version is almost 2000 dollars. Check out Crankorgan.com for DIY CNC plans at about 35 dollars each. If you can build a guitar, you can build a CNC machine.

I've built two cnc machines now. The first one was from John Kleinbauer's website. This showed me the basics and I then designed and built my own. John is an advocate of roller skate bearings and I used this along with drill rod, aluminum, and HDPE plastic. I have a great time making router templates and using the machine to do repetitious routing directly on the body. I recently purchased software that converts a jpeg or bmp file to Gcode ( the machine language). I am no electronics wizard, so I purchased a turn key set of motors and controller along with its software from Maxnc. The CNC has allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have attempted otherwise. I'm sure down the road 10 years they will be a pretty common tool in most home shops.

Hi Everybody,

I'm new to this forum. I've been building guitars for 26 years now as a serious hobbiest. I found this thread pretty interesting and I hope you don't mind me getting into the conversation here. I have completed about 20 pine tele bodies over the last 4-5 years. You can see some of them on the Telecaster discussion forum.

Now what I'm gonna say here is just my own opinion and I don't mean to step on anybody's toes. There isn't anything wrong with working with pine as a guitar wood. It helps to know what the results are going to be in advance. First the wood does dent easily, but there are other woods that dent easily too. Second, if using sugar pine, there is a chance that pitch pockets could become apparent, and sap could seep out after a good sanding. The third factor applies to many wood species.... stability.... some woods are more stable than others. Mahogany and Basswood are very stable. Other species have more wood movement when their environment changes. This doesn't mean that they make bad guitars, just that the wood needs to be well dried before turning into a guitar, and they should be kept at a similar humidity level.

What is funny to me is that guitar people have their likes and dislikes, and aren't really open minded about new materials and hardware. I built pointy necked guitars during the 80's and 90's, when basswood,poplar, and floyds were at their zenith. Now it's hard to sell one. I've heard people insist that only alder and swamp ash should be used for for any Fender instruments. We need to remember that wood is only one element that impacts the sound of a guitar. I recently spoke to an acquaintance whom has a couple of my pine bodies at a guitar show a few weeks ago. I was telling him about the pine renaissance (sp) for teles. He said there wasn't anything magical about the wood, that it just sounded " different". "It sounds good, but not like alder or swamp ash" I believe that different is good for some and not for others. It just depends on what floats your boat. Now I can't even offer an opinion on how the pine sounds, since all the product has been sold to other folks, and I'm not really a Fender guy anyway. The bottom line here is this, If the wood is dry and stable, workable, and not too heavy, there is a pretty good chance that a decent guitar is going to materialize. Would I use an SPF 2x4? If it were sitting around for a few years, I might try it out. Construction timbers are not dried to the same moisture content as other cabinet woods. I think they are around 10-11% or so moisture content, as compared to kiln dried hardwoods which are around 6-8 % moisture content.

Today's luthiers are using new and different tone woods for backs and sides that wouldn't have been considered 10-15 years ago. We all have our preferences, but sometimes we just might be surprised if we gave something different a chance.