It's Milling Time

It was time to get the neck blank down to thickness. I'll eventually shape it using the robo sander and neck template, but before then I had to lose about 7 mm off the back (else spend forever on the sander).

This setup is what happens when you have no space for specialised thicknessing tools, and a pragmatic attitude to health and safety: 

The router is clamped across the router sled, and the neck blank will be moved underneath the router. From the side you can see how it will remove material from the neck blank:

I'll remove very little on each pass, and lower the router bit slowly - I don't want any grabbing with this setup. Given that I need two hands to hold the neck piece under the router, I hold down the router trigger with a clamp:

I turned out this shook off when the router was powered. Instead, I used a bit of string...

This is fine. Nothing to be concerned about here...

In all seriousness, I was extremely careful using this setup. I was all screwed and clamped together and there was no risk of it coming apart. Obviously, in case anyone is foolish enough to be using this blog as any kind of instruction manual - be careful and use at your own risk. 

I started milling the blank to the right depth:

Until I got it close to the right thickness (as measured off the neck template):

At this point, I reattached it to the robosander template, and moved back to the pillar drill:

Until the profile along the length of the neck was correct:

At the headstock end of the neck, you can see the shape that will form the basis of the veloute:

Finally, I turned my attention to the tenon end of the neck. I needed a little more material on the sides of the tenon so that I could then sand it back down to a slightly tighter fit. I had some blue veneer kicking around my shed, so glued that to each side of the tenon: 

Once this was cured, I removed the clamps and am left with:

At the headstock end, with the beginnings of the volute. Note that the headstock is way too thick and needs to be thinned out as well:

And the tenon:

Next up, I'll probably start to tweak the mortice / tenon until its tight and straight. It wasn't too far off and could probably have been safely glued to be honest, probably fractions of a mm out of either side.  

I think the 'looseness' probably came from the fact that the robosander follower bearing isn't quite as accurate (relative to the sanding drum) as the one on the router bits. I should have anticipated the difference, but it shouldn't be a big deal to fix. 

Tenon Cut

Having routed out the neck pocket, it was time to start on the neck tenon to fit in it. Because of the angled neck, you need to cut the 'edges' on the side and bottom of the neck tenon (where the tenon meets the rest of the neck) at an angle to line up with the body. 

I copied a jig I'd seen Big D Guitars on YouTube use for this step:

I use the same 4 degree angled MDF triangles as before to hold the neck at the required angle. These were glued on as usual using the Luthiers Greatest Trick. The angle the neck block then makes with the 'table' at the top of the jig then represents the angle it will make against the guitar body.

 From the side:

And all clamped up.

I could then use the table to rest my Japanese saw on (which cuts on the pull stroke, and has a very narrow kerf). The resulting cut would therefore be in the same plane as the table, and by extension the same plane as the guitar body;

These are the cuts that are made on each side, and the bottom of the neck tenon:

And the resulting cut, I used the little ruler in to check that the cut was straight, and was in the right place at both the front and back of the neck:

And the other side:

This jig took a long time to set up and check everything was straight. It's a nice way to reliably make the cut, but I might in the future make it at a different point in the construction - or make something to allow the neck blank to be positioned easier.

These are the cuts that result:

I then used the neck template and the router to route out the shape of the neck tenon from the top:

Yielding this:

I used chisels and files to remove the rest of the material, test fitting it into the body along the way and failing to take any pictures until...

And from the side:

The neck tenon in largely done. However, there are two issues with it:

     - it is slightly looser than I want. I can correct this by glueing thin veneers to the edge of the tenon, and then sanding down again to size.
    - the second photo, from the side , has a small gap in the joint between the body and the neck. This suggests that something needs a little squaring up around the area.

Basically, the joint needs tweaking - which doesn't surprise me. I'll get onto this next week.

Neck Pocket

I wanted to make some progress on the neck. In the past I've finished the necks and bodies more completely before worrying about joining them, but given that this neck joint is a little harder than a typical Fender bolt on, I want to get that joint finalised as soon as possible.

First, while the neck is still slab shaped, I took the opportunity to place the fretboard in its final position. It's much easier now, rather than when the neck is shaped, since at the minute we have a straight edge that is parallel to the centre line - this feature is lost once the neck's taper is put on. That allows one to measure quite easily from the edge, and mark lines square to the centre line to help position the fretboard using the fret slots.

I drilled little holes through a couple of fret slots to place pins into the neck:

And I did similar into the neck template that I'll use later:

Again - a couple of pins through the template into the mahogany will locate it into the correct place later:

Then I started to shape the neck. A number of the jigs I'll be using in the next couple of stages rely on having one straight edge, so I'll leave one side (on the right in the picture below) straight and parallel to the centre line. I hack a chunk off the other side:

And start to mount it into my heel shaping jig. The MDF base of this jig has the shape of the neck heel in it. The neck block is be clamped on top of this, and the whole thing run against the robo sander as we've seen before. The robo sander will use the MDF as it's template, running it's bearing against it and shaping the mahogany as it goes.

The neck is clamped thus:

And I check that it is exactly square against the MDF base (it is):

We can see here the material that needs to be removed - the robo sander bearing will run against the MDF shape, and remove all the overhanging mahogany.

In fact, that's too much material for the robo sander to remove - it would take forever. I mark it out...

...and hack large chunks off using my bandsaw. This looks awful - a result of that cut being about at the limit of the thickness that my bandsaw can handle :)

However, once it's back in the jig, we can see that there's now significantly less overhang - so less material to remove:

This picture shows the jig in place, with the robo sander running against the mahogany:

And here's the heel half way through the process - you can see that the shape of the mahogany is approaching the jig shape:

And here's the neck finished, out of the jig. The bit on the right wasn't shaped due to it being too tall for the robo sander to reach. It will be cut off at a later stage:

I wanted to cut the tenon into the neck, but hadn't yet routed out the neck pocket. This was naturally the next thing to do. The neck plane on top of the body had already been carved at four degrees on the body. We can therefore mount a template to that plane and know that the base of the neck pocket will also be at four degrees. If the base of the neck pocket is at four degrees, then the neck will be at four degrees too :]

 From the side you can see the angle of the template:

As with the body chambering, I hog out a load of material using forstner bits before routing:

Like so,

Finally yielding:

The router simply runs on the template, using a follower bearing bit like so:

Eventually yielding this neck pocket:

Which, once the template is removed, looks pretty good:

Next up, I'd like to cut the tenon into the neck.I'm keen to get that in place before spending too much more time on the body shaping and neck / fretboard. 

It's a tricky joint which I've not done before. At at the minute I could get it wrong and throw away the neck without too much regret spend. Had I glued on the fretboard,shaped and bound the neck and so on, then it would be a bigger waste.