A different method of neck shaping

Friday was a fairly productive day of work on the electric. My instructor and I had decided that it would be a better idea to shape the neck before fretting, due to the fact that no amount of force on the truss rod would straighten the neck. Perhaps if the neck was carved and excess material removed, the neck would be more flexible and able to get out of the back bow. Why is this a big deal? In order to level the frets, the fingerboard needs to be straightened. It is possible to sand the fingerboard straight with the backbow, but it is a lot of work.

Before starting to carve the neck, I laid out the tuner hole spacing, drilled, then reamed the holes to fit the tuners. This went very well (much better than the fingerboard dots) and the tuners look awesome on the headstock. Here is what the look like:
Once I was satisfied with how the tuners fit, I started shaping the neck. In the electric class, we were taught a different method of neck shaping than we were taught in acoustic construction, so I decided to give this a shot. This involved rasping down to within 1/32" of the thickness of the neck at two points, in my case the 1st and 12th frets, establishing the round of the neck at these points, and rasping out everything else on the neck to blend everything all together nice and straight. Simple enough, but still time consuming. I even picked up a horse hoof rasp to make quick work of the rough shaping, but the refining took a lot longer.

Here are a couple shots of the neck nearly finished being shaped:


That's all I have for now. Maybe I'll start putting some pictures of my classmates instruments in progress up here as well. Here is a picture of the bass that my buddy Gomer is building. It is a set neck, with a massive chambered body. It should be pretty sweet.