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.