Neck fitting

I ordered some trapezoid inlays which were delivered, but I forgot and left them at work over the weekend. Instead of working on the fretboard, I turned my attention towards the neck joint, which needed a little fettling to get the small gaps tightened up.

Here's the joint before starting:

It's not bad, there's a little gap on the bass side. To remove this, you need to sand down the shoulder of the neck on that side. However, once one of the shoulders is changed, you also have to start adjusting all the others (on the heel, and then the other side of the neck).

First, I attached the Fricken Laser Bean to the body, so that I'd easily be able to check that the neck was straight as the joint was adjusted:

The beam runs along the centre of the body, like so:

... And should hit the nut, right in the centre of the neck. In this case, it was (annoyingly) a couple of mm off - which gives another reason to adjust the neck joint:

This isn't really a big deal - it's a tiny amount which can be compensated by pulling the neck slightly to one side as it's glued, or by mounting the bridge *slightly* (a mm or so) off centre of the body. However, since we're adjusting the neck joint, we should be able to correct this properly.

To adjust the neck joint, you basically need to remove very small amounts of material from the neck tenon. As you do so, the angle it fits into the mortice changes slightly. You need to be careful to remove tiny of material, as each removal makes the tenon smaller, so the joint less tight. I did this in conjunction with getting the neck's "shoulders" tight against the body.

One way of getting the neck and body joint tight is to put strips of sandpaper between them, and pull the sandpaper from side to side. This way is very slow:

But eventually starts to yield results by tightening up the gap:

Another way to check which bits of the joint need adjusting is to heavily coat the end of the body in chalk:

Once the neck is then offered up to this, the bits that are touching will be white, and should be removed (by sanding or gently chiseling):

After an hour or so, I ended up with a neck that was totally flat across the top of the body:

With no gap on any side of the neck joint. Bass side:

Treble side:

 And underneath the heel:

You can see in this photo on the left that the body needs a little material removed to meet the neck properly. Not sure how that happened, likely a combination of template misalignment and the robosander bearing not quite matching the size of the sanding drum, but I'll address that shortly!

I forgot to take a picture, but the tweaking of the joint also straightened up the neck, so the Frickin Laser Beam now strikes the centre of the nut.

Fretboard radius

There's almost nothing left to do before the fretboard needs to be shaped. A couple of little tidy up jobs.

I wasn't happy with how thin the veneer had become near the truss rod access hole. It was only about 1mm thick (just covered by the veneer, after the mahogany 'bit' broke duing the drilling a few weeks back), and could easily break in the future. To reinforce behind it though, the truss rod had to be moved back.

I marked where it had to move back to:

And chiselled it out:

Once done, the truss rod moved back 5mm or so, allowing for sufficient clearance underneath the veneer to reinforce it:

I used an offcut of ebony, superglued in place and held under tension with a pencil...

This will add another millimetre to the thickness, and will substantially strengthen it.

Now, it was on to the fretboard. Here's how Matt at Texas Toast does it: link. Takes about 30 seconds :( he even says he enjoys it.  Here's how I have to do it. There's more detail on this step in my telecaster build pages.

Tape the fretboard blank to a straight edge which will be used to run the radius block along (it's a 12" radius in this instance):

Masking tape / glue up the radius block:

And start sanding. Eventually, you'll sand a radius into the entire length, starting from the outside in.

Thinks to be careful of:

1. The fretboard stays straight along its length (don't sand in one place more than any other);
2. The fretboard top edge stays parallel to the bottom along the length (don't push more heavily on one end of the sanding arc compared to the other);
3. The radius block isn't pushed down too hard on one side or the other so the 'centre' of the radius ends up not being in the centre of the fretboard. 

This took a really long time - about an hour and a half, and it's boring, slow, dusty work. Eventually, you get this:

Note how the radius block is now covered with dust all across it's width, indicating that it's making contact with the entire fretboard and so put a complete radius on.

Here's the cross sectional view of the fretboard radius:

You can buy fretboards pre-radiused from Stew Mac, but I've not found anywhere in the UK that sells them. It's worth the extra cost to save this step, although you risk not getting the choice of wood you like.

Having spent so long on the fretboard, I wanted to do something that was easy and which made a visible difference to the guitar!

I attached the neck template to the neck, and rough-cut off the excess on the bandsaw:

Then after a quick visit to the robosander, the neck has its final shape. I forgot to take any pictures, but here it is 'attached' to the body:

And a close up on the neck joint - looking much sharper now, although a little more work is needed to snug it up completely.

With the fretboard radius out of the way, there's a number of jobs which are now opened up to tackle. These include the inlay work, the fretboard binding and (eventually) the fretting. I'll be ordering some trap inlays in the week, so it's possible that that will be the next job.