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I was so frustrated by the pickup winding that I decided to try something else, and have put a little bit of effort into getting the neck ready. The first thing will be getting the headstock glued on.

I practiced on scrap and it turned out really well on the first try -- so well I just would have used that piece except that it was just slightly too short for the neck.

When it was time to get the real piece ready, the first thing I did was plane one edge of the wood. This will be so I have a nice straight edge for my router edge guide to follow when I route the channels for the truss rod and carbon fiber.

Some shots of that. This is the thing in action (or just about) that I showed being built in reply 34.



The work piece is the wood with the green edge facing the camera. You can also see the bandsaw I use in the upper right. A power sander is in the distance behind the router, but you'd never know what it was if you didn't already know.



Different angle.



Maybe the angle that is easiest to see.

I think that one leg, in the foreground on the left, was damaged when the horizontal bandsaw ripped it from the vise. Fortunately, the top was still okay.


After that, I used some trigonometry, a calculator, and a right angle to draw a 14 degree angle. Why 14? 10 is common for necks made out of one piece of wood (without a join like I'm trying); 15 was recommended in one reference for a neck with a join. 14 gives me a degree of wiggle room in case of error.



You can see the smooth wood on the right, and unsmoothed wood on the left (plus a larger chip taken out of the far bottom left corner). I didn't bother to plane the last inch. Reason 1, well, now you can see the difference! Reason 2, it'll just be cut off anyway. Reason 3, that part of the wood was significantly less level than the rest of the wood, and I would have had to have cut off a lot more to get that part level.

Similarly, it's important to do all the measurements on the side of the wood that's planed. That's the only side that can guarantee you parallel / perpendicular lines when you use a square. It is also important to measure twice on both sides of the wood to be sure the distances are correct and didn't "wander" when drawing all those lines.


Now, I considered all sorts of things for how to cut that angle. A table saw might be ideal, but we don't have one -- that works. My first attempt was to use the horizontal bandsaw. I figured I could make a 75, 76 degree reference, rest the workpiece on top of the reference, put it all in the vise, and have the blade come down in its constrained path and cut it perfectly. No such luck. That angle is so steep, the horizontal bandsaw can't be raised over it. I could lower the wood, in principle, by sliding it back along the angle. But that bandsaw doesn't have any room for the wood to go, and besides, 75 degrees is steep enough that to move it down enough to get under the blade moves the wood completely away from the blade horizontally. Another possibility was turning the wood around and cutting it at the bottom of the slope instead of the top. But then it wouldn't be anywhere near the vise anymore.

So, I ended up just sticking it in the normal bandsaw and cutting it free-hand. I had to expose about 6 inches of the blade and cut through that much wood at once. It was very slow going -- it took me at least a half an hour to make that three inch cut. The friction from the blade scorched the wood, and it when it finally exited, I could see smoke. The blade also got badly stuck twice when cutting the practice piece, and once when cutting the real one. Also when cutting the practice piece, when it got stuck the second time, it threw the blade off the wheels. I don't think I can set up the blade as well as whoever did it before, which is maybe why the practice piece actually turned out slightly better than the real one. When it got stuck on the real piece, I looked for some bandsaw lubricant, and couldn't find any. I tried WD40 for the heck of it. Maybe it worked.

Here's what it looked like:



The black is from the scorching.


Obviously, that ain't a finished job. It needs to be planed just like the edge. This will be a little trickier, but I think I have a solution. I haven't been able to try it yet, though, because the shop area has been in heavy use lately.

Anyway, I have two off-cuts from the practice and real attempt. My plan was to do something like this:



Brace the neck wood (brown) with the two off-cuts, clamp them (grey) and clamp it all to a horizontal surface. Then the edge that I'll glue the headstock to will be perfectly horizontal, and can be planed. Maybe with a mill, which was my first choice, but I now think I might be able to do it with the router, too.

The problem? I tried setting this up, and the future gluing surface was nowhere near horizontal. It was slanted upwards, meaning that if I planed it horizontal, I'd end up with an angle greater than 14 degrees.

I first thought the laws of geometry were broken until I figured out what was going on. The band saw does not want to enter a piece of wood at a 14 degree angle. That's pretty close to glancing. So, the tendency is for the blade to bend and just travel alongside the wood as you push the wood in.




The off-cut ended up looking like this (but less exaggerated)



The cut line followed my drawn line, and so was at 14 degrees, but the angle from the bottom right to the upper right is greater than 14 degrees -- consistent with what I noticed.

I sanded down that "step" where the blade entered, and now it seems like the area to be smoothed does lay horizontally.

Got the other rail cut...



and glued...

I'm worried I didn't do a good job with this, but I got the headstock glued.

When I look at the join today, it looks pretty good. The two pieces of wood seem to be pretty tight against each other. If I had to do it again, I can't think of anything I'd do to do it better. And I got 8.5 inches from the end of the neck to the top of the head. That's probably enough, especially since I'll probably get about another inch of head from where the two pieces overlap.

Yeah, I went through my guitar notebook, and I futzed up my calculation.

The position of the nth fret, from the bridge, is

B = S/2^(n/12)

with S the scale length of the guitar. I'm using standard Fender scale length, 25.5". I also decided, for little reason, to have 25 frets. So, that gives me the number.

The position of the nth fret from the nut is

S - B

You then need to have so much more length to the fretboard; I chose 3/8". However, the second time I figured this out (I kept notes for the second calculation, but not the first), I added 3/8 of an inch to B, rather than S-B, so I ended up 3/4" short! Take off the space for the nut, and, yeah, my eyeball estimate of being off by ~1/2" was right.

Good thing I didn't just jump right in to making the template.