The Neck

With the body sufficiently coated in epoxy, I decided to postpone the 15 coats of lacquering and sanding and lacquering and sanding for a few months and start building the neck.

The neck begins with the creation of a rough Mahogany neck block. Essentially you have to make a few angled cuts, create a rough headstock, glue on a huge block of mahogany for the heel, square it all with a plane, and then begin shaping it into a neck.

Here's the headstock being trued with the neck shaft:

Here's the headstock being glued at a 15 degree angle to the neck shaft:

...and the rough neck blank in my "workshop"

Next a channel is routed down the center of the neck to provide room for a metal truss rod. The truss rod is essentially two rods that, when tightened, bend together in one direction. With a truss rod embedded within the guitar's neck, it is easy to straighten the neck to counteract the forces of string tension. If left uncorrected, the string tension would bend the neck over time to the point where the strings would begin to be too high above the fingerboard to be comfortably played.Now I'm beginning to rough out the headstock in preparation for applying the veneer:

Speaking of veneer, here's the massive 2" thick slab of Amazon Rosewood that I got from AlliedLutherie that will provide more than enough material for some veneers and a bridge:

For the headstock veneer, I've decided to go with a book matched rosewood wedge arrangement, with a curly maple center wedge (to match me tail graft on the body), then I'll bind the headstock later with the same curly maple and black/white/black strips as used on the guitar body. I also want to include a small abalone inlaid emblem thingy at the top, but I haven't decided what it will be yet...

..and the veneer faced headstock waiting for final trimming, routing, and binding:

Carving the Neckshaft and stuff

I guess I didn't take any pictures of the neck heel carving process, which was the next step. Basically you spend a while turning a block of mahogany into a symmetrical curving heal the ends evenly where the neck tenon occurs. I guess I also blew it on documenting the neck tenon carving process too.

Well anyway, now I have a neck with a heel and a tenon. Inside the tenon are two barrel nuts that will receive two barrel bolts threaded through the guitar's headblock and into the tenon. This is how the neck will be joined to the guitar. Over the next few months I'll be bolting and unbolting the neck from the guitar several times to adjust the flushness of the fit and the alignment of the neck.

So now, with roughed out versions of a neck at each end, I begin to round the block that comprises the neck shaft using a spokeshave (it's an old tool originally used to make spokes for wagon wheels).

Here's a close up of the roughed out heel:

Again, here's the idea:

I've got a Martin D-28 (love it!) that I'm taking neck curvature measurements against to at least get my final neck shape in the ballpark, then I'll finesse it further until it feels right to me:

Here's the first time I got to bolt the rough neck onto my guitar and actually pick it up! It was actually pretty exciting, since I've been working on this guitar for 7 months; now it's starting to feel like an instrument. Oh yeah, I'm checking the straightness too, whatever. Yes the stove is off (I actually removed the knobs when I left that afternoon - just in case the cat had any stupid ideas...)
Since I've been steadily approaching drawn outlines of the fingerboard while carving the neck radius, I thought now would be a good time to actually make the fingerboard and glue it down so I don't over zealously carve away too much material. Here's the set up I made for gluing maple binding strips to the edge of the fingerboard while maintaining a flush bottom:

Full Disclosure Note about the fingerboard: I chose to buy a "pre-slotted" ebony fingerboard instead of buying a slab of ebony and truing then slotting myself. While I'm confident that I could have done the procedures and measure accurately, it was waaaaaay easier and better for me to spend the extra $10 and essentially buy back a weekend. I still had to taper, bind, inlay, trim, etc. everything, but at least I won't have to spend all weekend trying to make a perfectly flat piece of ebony with limit tools, buy a $75 ruler to measure for the frets, and then make perfect little cuts with a tiny saw. Plus, when this thing is finally strung up and I'm troubleshoots the fine adjustments to mitigate intonation problems, at least I'll know it wasn't because my frets are improperly spaced. I'd HIGHLY recommend buying a pre-slotted fingerboard blank to anyone just beginning their first guitar. It's not cheating (seriously, it's not...no really...it's not...)

Anyway, binding the fingerboard with maple:

After I had bound the fingerboard and scraped the bindings flush with the top, I carefully measured for the fret marker dots (abalone), drilled their holes, glued them in place and scraped flush. I can't tell you how many times I checked to make sure I was putting the markers at the right frets...I was afraid (and still am) that I would pick the finished thing up one day and realize that I had put one in the wrong place...

After that I glued the fingerboard to the neck, with the truss rod installed inside. I guess I don't have pics of that yet, but I'm sure there will be plenty... it looks convincingly cool though. Now I can flip it over and go back to carving the neck shaft as it approaches the fingerboard. Also, I wanted to maintain a traditional element of the volute (triangular wood element at the headstock neck transition area). My Martin D-28 has one and I like it--plus I think it helps strengthen the joint area. I wasn't sure how to approach carving it (or really, saving it from being carved away) but as I keep going, it's beginning to emerge:

Here's a shot after I've refined the neck heel and the headstock joint a little further. After taking some thickness dimensions and comparing them to my favorite Martin D-28, I found that I needed to reduce the neck thickness another 1/16" or so.

Since we just sold out old dining room table, and it's been "advised" that I don't scratch up / destroy the new one, I have moved my intermittent guerilla guitar making operation into the guest bathroom...(yes, the neck is seen cantilevering over the toilet, which really only serves to increase my multi-tasking productivity now...)

Here's a progress photo of the maple bound headstock--next I have to do a little abalone inlay at the top. The holes will later receive the chrome tuning machines.

Headstock Logo Thingy

Just as with the soundhole rosette, I agonized a little about what I should do for a "logo" on the headstock. Throughout the construction of the neck and headstock I waffled between having and not having a logo or an emblem, and in the end I decided that it should be branded somehow (you rarely see a steel string acoustic guitar without a headstock emblem).

I thought I had settled on the idea of a small logo out of abalone--just a touch--to tie in with the rosette and fingerboard inlays. However, after trying a few ideas, I really wasn't liking the way the shell interacted with the maple... The next conundrum I had was deciding on a shape or form for my logo. It may seem like a simple and dumb thing, but when you go to do it and really think about it, the logo is really the most "graphic" element on the guitar and perhaps subject to the most scrutiny of familiarization, so it was a bigger decision than I thought. I thought of everything from a non-lame way to make an "S" (lastname) that hasn't been done already, to random symbols (but they needed some kind of connective meaning to me), to even abstract graphics of squid and evil bunnies (Donnie Darko style--I figured I would have regretted that down the road...)

In the end I decided that a black logo actually looked nicer with the overall guitar, and I found a nice way to incorporate a logo-thing that had meaning to me but was also abstract and "non-graphic" enough that I didn't end up with a demonic mythological beast or something...

In the end, I took the motion of conducting an orchestra in 4/4 time and sweetened it up a little to make a nice abstraction. It also happened to sit well within the context of my headstock.

To do this, I had to draw the form on the headstock, score it with a scribe, and file / excavate the material until I was about 1mm deep. Here's a picture of the half excavated form:Once I had fully cleaned out the shape, I was tasked with the question of "what to fill it with to make it black?" My original idea of black epoxy turned out hard to find, so I settled on black ebony sawdust and superglue. Before I started however, I coated the surrounding maple and rosewood with a thick film of superglue (but not in the file slots) to fill the pores and prevent any ebony dust from becoming embedded in the outlying wood, which would be almost impossible to remove. Once that dried, I simply packed the gaps full of dust (allowing it to sit high) and covered in superglue (to be scraped flush later). Here's a nice shot of that:

...and here's the almost final headstock after scraping...

Once I final sand it and seal with epoxy and lacquer it will look really nice (I hope).

Fretting and Headstock Finishing

Now that I've finished up the headstock face (but it still needs lacquer) I thought I'd move on to fretting. Basically a fret is a small length of wire, T-shaped in cross section, with a barb that digs into the slots in the fingerboard to hold the fret in place. You can either hammer them in, or press them in--I chose to press them in for fear of smashing a huge hole in the fingerboard and then having to creatively inlay some piece of abalone and pretending that I wanted it there...

Before pressing in the frets, I measured each of the 20 fret slots for their barb length (down to the 64th on an inch) and pre-cut all of my frets. I made this little Styrofoam block to help keep them organized:
Since my fingerboard is bound with a thin maple strip, the fret slot doesn't extend to the edge of the fingerboard so I have to remove a short length of the barb from each end of the fret (this way the fingerboard edge will also look "cleaner" without 20 visible barb-ends). To do this, I used a borrowed tool designed specifically to cleanly remove this little piece.

Pressing the frets into the fingerboard can be accomplished many ways--a lot of people use a drill press and a brass "caul" that's curved to fit the fret to press them in. I thought "I bet I can accomplish that with a curved piece of hardwood and a C-clamp"...it actually worked. It takes some patience and careful attention to the torque angle of the clamp, but the end result seems fine. Here's a pic of the inaugural fret:

Once I get them all in I'll go back and carefully file the ends flush with the fingerboard and bevel them. After I got most of the frets in (except for the tougher ones around the heel--I need to make a support block to help me clamp them in) I decided to seal the headstock with epoxy in preparation for lacquering. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out:

Since the headstock epoxy worked out well, I went ahead and finished up contouring the neck and applied an alcohol-diluted epoxy rub with a rag to the neck and heel--it'll be all sanded off later and the neck subsequently oiled:

NEXT: Make a Nut

The next task I was faced with was roughing out the string "nut" from an oversized blank of cow bone. The purpose of the nut is to act as a "zero" fret and supply the point of contact for the strings at the headstock end of the neck. It also plays a crucial role in transferring string vibrations through the neck and into the soundbox (body) where they're amplified, so the material of choice is fairly important. Many stock production guitars use either plastic or some form of synthetic bone--for a nominal couple of bucks I chose to make mine from cow bone, which is more commonly found on higher-end custom guitars due to its higher density and better transmission of vibrations. The bone comes as a rectangular block and looks something like this:

After some rough sanding, cutting with a jewler's saw, and some gentle filing, I've roughed out the nut's final shape (less the string notches which I'll create later) and dry fitted it in the slot between the end of the fingerboard and the headstock veneer sheet:

Now I feel like I've hit this point where I could spend forever filing this or tweaking that, but those adjustments might be better made during the final fitting stage, so I decided to finish up the roughing of the neck by checking the alignment of the neck with the body.

FINISHING: Lacquering

Ha! I'm finally there--lacquering! The end is in sight...

Actually this part seemed pretty intimidating at first, since I have to actually apply a mirror-like finish to the instrument that I've been building for a solid year now. There are actually a few different lacquering products and techniques to choose from, but given my modest circumstances I chose to brush on a waterbased finish. Presently I've completed the entire lacquering stages and have to say it actually went very smoothly and is far less complicated than it will initially seem to the beginner.

If you're interested in my trials and tribulations using KTM-9 Waterbased lacquer with a Brush On Application, click here to read my detailed account.

I thought I'd start lacquering (practicing) on the headstock first since it's small and flat, and I was pretty confident that I could correct any mistakes I might make. I'm using a $0.54 foam brush from Home Depot, moving slowly so as to avoid introducing bubbles into the finish. I'll end up applying around 12-15 coats, slowly building up thin layer by layer, and sanding level every 2-3 coats. This stuff dries very quickly so it's possible to brush on all the coats in just a couple days. Ultimately, I'll allow the lacquer to cure for 3 weeks (as it shrinks and hardens) before sanding it all level with 400 grit paper, progressing toward a super fine 1200 grit or so, and finally polishing the whole thing to a mirror like shine on a buffing wheel.

Here's the headstock after the final coat--the fine brush strokes will all be sanded out after the finish is allowed to cure and harden for 3 weeks:

Since lacquering the headstock went well, I decided to sand smooth the guitar body's surfaces and proceed with the real challenge:

In order to manipulate and clamp the body while brushing on the finish, I made this super nice wooden handle and bolted it on to the guitar (which I actually had the foresight to complete before taping the soundholes closed...)

The lacquer is applied one surface at a time and tacks hard in about 20 minutes, so I could continually rotate the body and keep applying coats at a full coverage rate of about an hour. Brushing on the sides and avoiding drips and runs kind of reminded my of the way the hardshell chocolate ice cream cone thingys are dipped at Dairy Queen...

Fast forward a few days and 15 coats into the future, and it's done! The final 3 coats went on without sanding, and now I just have to wait 3 weeks before sanding and buffing. With the exception of two hiccups (see next post) it all went off without any major setbacks.

Since I still need my vice to build a bridge, I summoned all of my MacGyver skills together to transform a door, a bar clamp, some cable ties, an ethernet cable, and a towel rack into a highly sophisticated drying rack...

FINISHING: Lacquering Hiccup

This might be more of interest to the potential builder:

I ran into a potentially serious problem about midway through the lacquering phase. Apparently I hadn't gotten enough superglue underneath the two maple strips comprising my center strip marquetry on the back. This issue went completely unnoticed during sand, leveling, even applying the epoxy wood sealer. It wasn't until I had a few coats of lacquer on that the problem occurred.

I walked into my workshop (bathroom) to apply the 4th or 5th coat and immediately saw a substantial bulge forming in the marquetry on the back--I could even push it in and out! Apparently the lacquer (which constricts as it dries) was pulling up / apart the two maple strips that had not been adequately glued in place! I knew this would be more than a cosmetic issue, as once the lacquer fully cured hard, it would surely crack as soon as anyone touched that area.

You can kind of see the bulge in the center line below:

I wanted to come up with a way to secure the strips without ruining the already applied finish, so I devised a plan to access the cavity from within the guitar body underneath the strips and pump a little glue in there. I tracked down an old style hand-crank drill so I could control the speed of the drill cut and used a long 1/16" drill bit to bore a small hole through the back on the inside just until I saw maple dust coming out of the hole (without going through). Every time I turned the handle it sound like I was making a phone call on an old crank phone.

Once I had my hole, I needed a way to inject a little super glue into the spot so that I could press from the outside until the void was filled and the marquetry strip returned to flat. Having been a Diabetic since I was 5 years old, I now know that the purpose of my affliction was so that on this very day, at this very moment, I would have access to insulin syringes...finally, some closure...

...and here's me pushing as hard and as gently as I can to close up the wound. I think I actually got low blood sugar after doing this...

Phew. Crisis avoided. Now to make sure I don't accidentally reuse that insulin syringe...