Telecaster Two build - neck truss rod channel

Did a bit of tidying up of the second solid body by putting a small radius on edge. I think the 50's/60's Fenders had a radius of 1/8" (c3mm). This is a 2mm radius and I've not yet decided whether to keep it or make it a larger radius (I believe the modern telecasters have something closer to 1/4" radius):



I have a very bright and directional light in the workshop which gives the crazy shadows in the pictures...

Onto the neck.

The neck for the solid body telecaster will be AAA flamed maple. This was sanded flat:



And I threw a bit of thinners on the grain. Nice:



Then the edge was straightened and planed to 90 degrees off the face;



Shavings are much nicer than dust...



I drew a centre line off the now straight edge and drew the neck on using a perspex template. Next step is to rout out the channel for the truss rod. I put a stop at the end of the neck so that I wouldn't have to worry about where to stop the router once it was cutting:



And made a first, shallow pass:



Then crept up on the depth needed to make the truss rod exactly flush with the top face of the neck. This is a dual action truss rod by the way, so the channel can just have a square bottom along its length:



The correct depth is reached:



Now a little more work is needed at the other end of the truss rod. The adjustment wheel has a larger diameter than the actual rod, so you need to cut some more wood away:



I forgot to take any pictures of this, but after a few more controlled passes of the router and a couple more stops set in place, you get this:



Which, once the end of the neck is trimmed down, yields this:



A close up:



Once complete, the wheel of the truss rod will stick out from the neck itself. I plan for the wheel to eventually be hidden under the scratchplate once it's mounted to the body, so there will be no visible impact of using this style of truss rod, but it will make adjustment slightly easier compared to the more traditional style.

The truss rod is now perfectly positioned, and the adjustment wheel set in place. However, the maple neck is actually significantly thicker than I need it to be so the next job on the neck will be to mill some of that thickness away. Before I can do that I need to know what thickness it needs to be, and before I can know that I need to have a radius'ed fretboard.

This means that there's no way to put off radiusing the fretboard much longer :(