1.5 days left to finish the neck...

Am I nervous? A bit. I will get it done! I'm determined to.

Today felt like progress and that's always a good feeling. After an hour long lecture, I pinned and glued my headcap laminate to my headstock and had to wait for it to dry, but conveniently had another lecture on inlay work in the time it needed to dry. After unclamping, i rough thicknessed the headstock with the safety planer to give the back of the headstock a flat enough surface to stick a block to for supporting the headstock and keeping it square while cutting out the shape on the bandsaw and smoothing it out on the spindle sander. I then did a little hand touch up involving some rather complex sanding tools including a couple of flexible rulers and a sandpaper roll. Once I was satisfied with the headstock shaping and symmetry, I laid out the tuner locations and drilled the tuner holes. My 3/8" drill bit wasn't quite big enough for the tuners, so I had to do a little reaming by hand and the tuners fit like a glove.

Here's a photo of the tuners in the headstock. I only put one bushing/washer in to see how they worked(lower left tuner), but all the tuners will have them on the assembled guitar.

You can use your imagination here to get an idea of what the finished guitar will look like. It's getting close!Here's a shot of the end graft as mentioned in previous blogs. I should have made sure the camera was in focus when I took this. I'll post another pic of this later after it's been cleaned up a bit.

In archtop news, I'm finally done carving the outside arch on both the top and back. I starting scraping tonight and it will probably take me all of the class period on thursday to finish the scraping, but it really feels good to be moving on and know that I will be starting graduations(inside arching) very soon.

Here's a couple shots of the back in the scraping process:


Tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get my neck taper rough thicknessed, glue on the neck, install fingerboard side dots, and glue the fingerboard on so I can shape the neck on Thursday. I'm sweating a little bit, but if I focus it can be done...