I finished up my end graft on Tuesday and have since forgotten to take a photo of it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but there is just one miter that will need a bit of "touch up" before the finish is sprayed. I also got my heel carved sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday, but I don't exactly remember what day I did that. Other than that, Wednesday and Thursday were spent fitting the dovetail. Even with a fancy dovetail routing jig, there is still a good deal of dovetail fitting necessary to get a good joint and a good looking heel. I did really well in neck reset class and so I thought I would be able to fly through this on the real guitar, but this sadly did not happen. I am happy to say however, that I am one of the few people in the class not needing to shim the dovetail. That is one task that I am feeling really good about being done so I can move on to more exciting things. I think the next flat top steel string guitar I build is going to have a bolt on neck.
Here is a shot of the carved heel and fit dovetail. Yes, there is a gap showing because the dovetail would not stay all the way in for the picture due to the heel not being cut down to length.
Today, I routed the truss rod slot in the neck. Because it is going to be adjusted through the soundhole, I had to make the truss rod slot a little deeper at the neck/body joint to allow access to the truss rod underneath the top. This was done by shimming the neck at the nut end on the router table so the depth of the slot actually tapers from deeper at the body to about 1/64" over the thickness of the truss rod at the nut. Before gluing the fingerboard on, there will be a spline glued on over the truss rod so it won't be loose in the slot, preventing it from functioning properly.
Here is the neck with the truss rod slot routed. There is an area marked on the top which will be routed out to allow the truss rod to enter the body and make neck removal much easier when a neck reset is needed in the future.
After routing the truss rod slot, I glued some wings onto the headstock, as the neck blank was not quite wide enough to accommodate my headstock design and really didn't want to alter it. The funny thing is that only a really small 1/2" x 1/8" section of the wings are actually needed for the headstock, so most of the "wings" will get cut off anyways. That will be happening tomorrow.
Here's a photo of the headstock wings glued on:
I also did some work on the fingerboard today, getting it radiused and tapered. It's the little things like this that get me excited and make me think it's actually going to be a guitar eventually.
Here is the fingerboard laid on the neck to show what it is going to look like:
Archtop is moving along, slowly but surely... Top final arching is nearly done and back final arching is nearly done. I should be scraping by tomorrow night and moving on to graduations by next tuesday. Hopefully the box will be together by the end of march, leaving the month of april to get necks done. I may actually finish this thing...
Here's the top arch almost done with the carving and just about ready for scraping:
I made a good deal of progress in electric on Friday. I finished routing the chambers and got the wire channel locations laid out and routed. I did forget to route the channel for the bridge ground, but it's just one wire and the channel doesn't need to be very big and can be drilled. The body looks pretty holy right now, but there is still a lot of wood to be routed, including the tremolo/spring cavity, control cavity, neck pocket, and pickup cavities which will all be done at a later time.
Here is a shot of the body with chambers and channels routed:
As I had written in the previous post, I was kind of worried at how my top join would come out. It didn't help that it was 1/2" thick in the first place and I was using the same method I'd use to join an acoustic guitar top, so needless to say I was crossing my fingers. Thankfully, crossing your fingers is a good tactic and one side of the joint looked good. The other side, however, looked like somebody was trying to glue a plate and a bowl together or something. Because the top on an electric guitar is more aesthetic than structural as opposed to an acoustic or archtop, the one good side of the joint was enough to suffice. After thicknessing, I was happy to find out that it was still 7/16" thick, 1/16" under my desired dimension, but I can still make it work out with the depth of my preamp electronics.
I then cut out the top wood to the outline of the guitar body and drilled some locating pin holes in the location of the neck pocket and bridge pickup for gluing, cut some dowels to length and glued the top to the body using some veneer presses.
Here is a shot of the body with the top cap glued on and ready for flush routing:
And another shot of the body with some different camera settings. This cap wood is so cool because it looks a lot like Koa:
And that's it for this post. More neck progress later this week...
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