Trussed up

It was time for more work on the neck. The main job that needs doing structurally is inserting the truss rod. I'll be using a double action truss rod which just needs a straight 6mm rout down the centre of the neck. 

My usual method is to run the router along the edge of the neck blank, using a fence to keep it centred. However, I forgot to plane a straight edge along the side of the neck blank. Now that I'd glued on the heel, and given I don't have a decent vice in my shed yet, this would be slightly annoying to do now. 

Instead, I straightened an edge by running a follower bit along a straight piece of mdf, changing the edge of the neck blank from this:

To this:

Doing it this way at least meant that the edge of the neck blank was guaranteed to be at 90 degrees to the face - using the router made sure of that. However, it took was longer than the five minute job it would have been with the plane had I not already glued on the heel extension :)

Next up I spent a long time measuring up the neck, body and fretboard. The neck will join the body at the 16th fret, which, using the pre-slotted fretboard, means we can mark the position of the nut on the neck blank. From here, we can add the width of a 5mm thick nut and the positions of the fretboard and truss rod then cascade:

I marked the start and stop position of the truss rod and set up the router fence and depth stops:

I then made passes along the neck blank, increasing the depth of the router bit as I crept up on the final depth: 

...until...

With the body end of the truss rod sorted, I looked at the nut end. the truss rod adjuster is about 8mm thick, so needs a bigger rout to locate in the neck:

I routed this in, stopping before I came to the nut's location. I wanted there to be a 'bridge' of wood across the truss rod for the nut to sit on - the internet insists this makes a tonal difference (*coughs*). I was hoping that I could drill this out:

And, using increasing sized drill bits, I crept up to the required size:

I suspect that this was a bit of a hacky way to do this, but I was very happy with the result, but the next (and final) drill bit I used to get the access hole to its correct size caused the bridge to break - it just got too thin. This was annoying but not the end of the world - it will just mean that the truss rod will be visible once the nut is out:

After chiselling out a fraction of a mm from the bottom of the truss rod channel. The rod fits in perfectly along the length of the neck:

The last thing to do was to glue on the headstock. I drilled a couple of locating holes to stop it slipping around on the glue and securely clamped it on: 

I'll leave it overnight to cure fully. 

The neck blank is now in one piece. The next stage will be to shape it. My method of using a drill to create the truss rod access hole was that of a cowboy, and I probably removed a mm or so of wood more than I should have. I don't want to weaken that part of the neck, so may create a volute at the joint. 

It's obviously off spec, but I like the look:

 I'll have a think.