Telecaster build - neck truss rod channel

This is a similar story to the previous truss rod installation. I'm using a different style truss rod, rather than the wheel adjuster it has the more traditional nut which sits in the heel of the guitar. It's still a double action rod, so the channel is simple to rout.

First things first - these come pretty grubby and corroded. I sanded and polished the adjustment nut on the dremel.

Sanded (and clamped in my nice new vice :]):



And polished with metal polish / rag wheel on the dremel:



Shiny. I gave it a quick dunk in lacquer to stop it corroding again and left it to dry:



Then the same story of sanding the face of the neck blank flat and smooth followed by planning a straight edge off it. 
I've not used birds eye maple before - I can see that the grain is going to be problematic. I don't think the surface of the maple that I bought had been put through a sander and there were a number of nicks in it. Some of these were quite deep and would have taken a lot of sanding to remove. Instead, I filled then with superglue and hit them with accelerator to cure quickly:



Then I sanded this back (you can see some of the marks in the surface in this picture. I didn't want to plane them all back with this crazy grain and it would have taken a lot to sand some of them out):



It looked pretty good. I usually wouldn't use this method as superglue tends to dry darker than the wood around it. In this case, given the grain I think it looks ok. Don't forget also that this surface will be under the fretboard, so I'm really only worried about the grain tears that are around the edge of the neck, where they might be visible at the interface between the fretboard and the neck. 

Then I planed an edge flat and 90 degrees from the finished face: 



The grain is tricky - that plane is sharp enough to shave hairs on my arm and you can still see tearout.

Set some stops for the router: 



And crept up on the required depth:



Still creeping:



Done:



Now, the heel end is trickier than with the heel style adjuster. I've seen two ways to fit this truss rod style on the internet. 
The first involves drilling a hole the same diameter as the adjustment rod into the end of the heel. This is probably the best method, but I currently lack the tooling / jigs to be able to drill that hole accurately enough. 
The second method involves routing a larger cutout for the adjustment nut, and gluing a plug in place to fill it up. Hopefully pictures will be more useful.

I rout out the area for the adjustment nut:



And drill a hole in an offcut for the adjustment hole:



This will be used to plug up the area on the end of the heel:



I forgot to take enough pictures, but basically that offcut is trimmed down until it fits snugly into the routed out area:



Then it's glued in place:



And once trimmed, the truss rod can be finally fitted:



The truss rod can currently be taken in and out - it will eventually be held in place by the pressure of the fretboard above it. 

I'm going to have to sort a way to shape this neck using a robosander / some other vertically mounted drum sander - I don't think that the router (usual method) or my planes (unless I can get them insanely sharp) will be good enough to avoid tearout on this grain. 

As with Telecaster Two, there's now nowhere to go apart from radiusing the fretboard. I'm still waiting on the fretboard radius block to come from Guitars and Wood (I think they've closed over Christmas) - at least there's still a legitimate excuse standing between me and having to do it :(