Building 3 necks Part 1 Below: Shown are 3 blanks carefully cut and slotted for the truss rods. The template sits on top, the plan is seen behind and in front are the tools I use to mark things out. What isn't in the picture is the 1.2 meter straight edge used to draw the centerlines. Believe it ir not the 600mm stainless steel ruler is not dead straight, even though I paid $50 odd dollars for it. The straight edge cost me considerably more than the rule even though it is only made of aluminium. It does however have one reference edge machined square and straight.   Below: The blanks ready for the headstock rough thickness cut.   Below: The blanks have been roughed out on the bandsaw and tidied up on the spindle sander. I like to leave as little as possible for the router to take off as the it will mash the neck and fingers too if it grabs. If you have just a smidgin for the router to take, the chances are nearly zero of it grabbing. You can minimise the chance of grabbing and tearout even further by using a sharp spiral upshear bit. BTW you can see the headstock thickness has been cut at the headstock end.   Below: Routing complete with a nice smooth finish. I paid over $100 dollars for that spiral upshear bit and since its purchase I have not wasted a body or neck blank due to tearout. This is pretty important to me as I use only expensive premium timbers.   Below: The blanks with the template stripped off showing the block at the end of the truss rod slot. This will be drilled out so the adjuster nut can be accessed Fender style from the heel. You can see a couple of router grabs in the slots of the centre and right neck. I have used a piece of sapele to fill the voids even though they were only a couple mm deep. No-one would ever see it except the guy who one day in the future might pull off the finger board for repairs. I just can't leave stuff like that. The one on the left is the ash neck used for #18.   Below: The blanks are beginning to look like necks after all that work. The headstock cutout has been cut away on the bandsaw. These are the first necks using this headstock shape. It is tricky to come up with an original design and will always look similar to some other headstock. I drew this one up outa my head and apologise to anyone else who uses similar.   Now it's time to flatten the inconsistencies out of the headstocks left by the bandsaw This little gem.is called a Wagner Safe T-Planer. It is a great little addition to the drill press for leveling and thicknessing small jobs like this .     Below: truss rods installed with a little silicon so they don't move     Below: You can see how I have glued in and drilled a small block to allow access to the truss rod adjuster. Next job is laying them out on the fretboards which have already been slotted and radiused. Glueing down a fretboard has a few tricks to it. I haven't done a lot of them and each one teaches me more things to avoid.     Below: Finally Ready for the fretboards     Below: Studs in to stop fretboard slippage when clamping - i use 3     Below: Fretboard glueup     Below:Out of the clamps and a bit of a trim up on the band saw. #18 again     Below:Trim up the edges with handplanes     Below: Trim the board back to 22 frets     Below: Trim up flush with the table mounted router. #18 at the left     Below: Setting up for rounding off the fretboard end at the headstock     Below: Using the spindle sander to make the transitional cut     Below: Finished stage 1 - next job is to add the the side dots and fret markers     pretty much done now just waiting for the carve. The ash neck [front] goes on #18 pretty well straight up and the others sit in the back of the workshop waiting for a lull in the neverending stream off clients guitars and cab builds. I have pix of the rest of #18 carve somewhere - must put those up sometime. I have a pictorial on other aspects of a neck build including the carve here    BACK TO WORKSHOP