I checked the centre line, and did a last lot of measurements to make sure that it was square and straight on the neck blank. It was:
It was tape / super glued into the radiusing jig:
And the radius block prepared with 80 grit paper:
Threw some chalk on so I could get annoyed at just how slow the progress was:
Five minutes later:
Ten minutes later. You may notice that it doesn't look very different:
I've got a whole load of these progress pictures, but rather than show them all, here's the finished product after what felt like about 14 hours of sanding:
You need to make sure that the fretboard remains straight along its length and also that the radius is 'even' on both sides of the centre line; i.e. that the height of the board is the same on both sides of the centre line at 10mm, 20mm etc distances from the centre.
At this point, I decided to see exactly how badly the birdseye maple that this fretboard is going onto would work with the router. I did a test, and it actually routed ok, guess I was being over cautious:
I thought it was worth going for it for real so mounted up the template and cut it out:
I then temporarily attached the fretboad and routed that off the shape of the maple neck. However, I forgot to take any pictures, so there's only a shot of the neck completed:
And another:
And without the fretboard:
And the detail of the heel. A little router burn here but as the heel is marginally oversized at the minute, it can easily be sanded off without compromising a tight fit to the body:
And finally, here is the guitar as it currently stands:
Before I can mill away the back of the neck blank to its final thickness, I'd like to have the fretboard completely finished.
The next jobs therefore will be to bind the sides of the fretboard and make and mount the dot inlays. The fretboard will then be sanded to its finished grit.
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