Looks like a guitar, don't it?

It's been a rather busy day and a half. I worked my but off yesterday and am glad to have done so. The day started off with some preparation of the neck for gluing on to the body. This involved rough thicknessing the neck to within 1/32" of the finished thickness taper using the safety planer, transferring the width taper to the back of the neck and rough cutting off the excess width, and then cutting off the excess length from the heel. After a final check of the dovetail fit, heel fit, centerline, and neck angle I heated up some hide glue and got the neck on.

Here is a shot of the neck being glued:

While waiting for the neck joint to dry, I installed the fingerboard side dots. This was an easy task, which I just so happened to slightly screw up, but you have to look pretty close to notice that the 12th fret dots are not parallel to the fingerboard.

Here's the dots glued in:

After lunch and when the neck had sufficient clamp time, I made a spline for the trussrod and installed it. The purpose of this spline is to hold the trussrod securely into the neck since the trussrod slot is deeper at the body end than it is at the headstock. Without it, there would be a big gap between the trussrod and the fingerboard and render the trussrod useless. The reason for the slot being deeper at the body is that the trussrod will be adjustable through the soundhole, making it quite difficult for me to adjust but I really like the clean look of no trussrod cover on the headstock.

Here is what it looks like with the trussrod installed and neck leveled ready for a fingerboard:

I also cut off the excess from the fingerboard and rounded the end to match the curvature of the soundhole. The end is also beveled and hangs over the soundhole just a bit and I think it looks pretty cool. I just barely had time to get the fingerboard glued between dry clamping and waiting for the hide glue to be ready, but I got it on and used about 21 clamps total to glue it up. I somehow still had a slight gap on the bass side from the 7th-12th frets, but I have some various ideas about how that will be fixed. I really have no idea how the gap happened though....

Here's the fingerboard being glued:

I started shaping my neck at about 8:15 this morning after finding a neck shaping jig and a decent spokeshave and got pretty close to finishing it by lunch time. Unfortunately, it still has some work to do, but I now have until may to have the guitar ready for finishing so I will get it fine tuned over the next month or so.

Here's some shots of the neck shaping in progress and the method of holding the guitar in place to do the shaping:

Well whaddya know, the guitar is almost done. I just have a lot of sanding and scraping to do, some fret work, some lacquer spraying, finish shaping the neck, and make a bridge/saddle and nut. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel...

Here's a couple shots of the guitar:
Yes, there is a lot of glue squeeze out all over the place, but it will be scraped and sanded off so it really will look pretty I promise.
Well, that's it for today. I'm off to archtop to do some scraping!