Neck Carve - rough shaping

In the last session I made a very rough pass at the first fret carve. The neck carve is simple to visualise - carve the shape you want at the first and 12th fret, then join those two up with straight lines.

I started up by finalising the shape at the first fret, referring constantly to my template until:

The template was from guitarsandwood, who have some great products for those in Europe.

I started at the 12th fret:

Until:

This is the shape of the neck at this point:

The neck step is to join both of those carved portions with a straight line. First I hog out the material in between with a spoke shave:

Once most of the material is removed, you can turn to a sanding beam to remove the rest. Unfortunately, my sanding beam is too long for the job:

So, I make a new one out of MDF, planing a straight edge into an offcut:

And hardening up the edge by soaking it in CA glue - I did this outside as it's incredibly aggressive in terms of fumes:

Before adding sandpaper to the edge:

And moving onto the neck to join those two carved portions up:

As usual, I add some chalk to the sections to carve away so I can monitor progress:

Here we can see that there's a low point in the right hand side, where the levelling beam does not touch the neck - this needs a little more work:

Until:

Eventually, both sides are roughed out. This is a long way fro finished, but it's good enough for now for a rough shape:

Once the neck is done, I moved onto the heel. I marked out a circular shape for the heel by drawing around a tin I had in the shed:

And started to file down towards it:

By now I'd been manually sanding for a couple of hours and was bored of it. Always a dangerous move, I reached for the power tools....

And started working, attentively, on the heel:

Until it was also roughed out:

And the whole neck:

The neck is only, at this point, rough carved. There's clearly a great deal of work left on it, but for now all the work at the lowest grits has been done. I'll come back to this in a couple of weeks.

I offered the new neck up to the body:

And put the whole guitar together:

Next up, I'll start to look at the body again. The most significant piece of work left on it is to rout the bridge plane, which is an intimidating piece of work, as it involves using the router on the body again...

More fretboard finishing

I'm several weeks behing updating here! The next couple of posts will catch up :]

There was one piece of binding left on the fretboard. I chopped a thin piece to size for the end: 

Which when fitted will look like this:

Before I added it, I wanted to sand the side bindings down and do a little extra shaping of the fretboard:

The fretboard is now at it's final shape. That means:

- It is straight end to end;
- The radius is constant all along it's length; and
- The centre of the radius it along the middle of the fretboard all along it's length

The fret slots were slightly gummed up with CA glue from when I put on the binding strips. I used my fret slot cleaning tool to scrape the inside of the slots. This is an aggressive tool, and needs to be used carefully, especially given the amount of work in the fretboard to this point:

The piece of end binding I'd cut earlier wasn't quite tall enough to cover the highest point of the fretboard in the middle. I cut a piece of taller binding:

While the CA glue appears to have been very good at sticking the binding on the sides of the fretboard, I wondered if it might not work as well on the endgrain. To give it a bit of help I scored the end of the fretboard:

And the binding:

And glued them together:

After a few minutes the glue was set up well enough that I could use my fret nippers to snip the binding to the same radius as the fretboard:

Yielding a fully bound fretboard:

There's still a little CA staining on the board which will need to be sanded out, as well as sanding the board to a higher finished grit. These will be covered in the future, but for now the board can be considered complete.


I had a little time so thought I'd make a start on the neck carve. Whilst this is one of the most enjoyable stages of the build, I am always concerned about taking the neck too thin, running the risk of 'carving' through into the truss rod channel. I took measurements to make sure I knew what thickness I could go to, and what tolerances I had. You can also see in this photo my new LP neck template thing - showing what the neck should look like at the 1st, 7th and 12th frets.

I marked the centre line, and the 1st and 12th frets. My general rule is that (assuming you thicknessed your neck blank to the right thickness) the centre line should never be touched - at the end of the carve the line should still be visible. This will mean that the back of your neck is stll as straight as it was when you thicknesses the neck. 

This shows how the template will be used at the first fret:

And as the carve proceeds: 

I started chalking the template heavily:

Then pressing it against the neck:

Which showed where it touched the wood, and which bits have to be removed next:

This is a slower method than my usual - where I just free hand the shape, but in this instance I am keen to replicate a 'traditional' carve shape.

I didn't do much carving before running out of time, but here's the neck components together:

Fretboard binding

I did more work on the fretboard. First I cut each edge straight - you may remember last week that I'd had to leave the last couple of inches of the board's edge untouched so as not to carve the neck template's tenon into them. I corrected this by using a piece of straight scrap as a template to finish off the edges in the router:

Then I applied the binding. First I used my follower bit with a smaller bearing to cut a test channel, and make sure that my bearing size gave a binding channel the right size for my 1.5mm binding. The binding I'm using is 1.5mm 'vintage cream' plastic binding. It fitted perfectly:

Then I used the same straight edge that the fretboard was already attached to, and ran my router with the bearing and follwer bit up the side of it. This removes 1.5 mm thickness from each side of the fretboard:

The fretboard is now too thin (relative to the width of the neck) by three mm. We will glue the binding strips to either side to bring it back up to the correct width:

This is what the binding will look like when attached to the board:

I planned to use some solvent acrylic glue ('Weld-on 16'') to attach the binding. It's the same stuff I used for the binding on my telecaster body. It cures very quickly, so you need to be ready - the pieces were cleaned with white spirit, and stripes of tape prepared to clap the binding together:

In the event, my glue had cured in the pot to a big block of jelly :/. I came up with another plan..

I clamped the binding to the fretboard tightly with tape:

On both sides:

Then filled a pipette with thin CA glue. This stuff wicks into gaps really well:

I then dropped the CA glue onto the joint between the binding and the fretboard:

Like so:

And went along the entire fretboard:

Front and back:

 I then removed the tape, and dropped into the joint that had been covered up. Once complete, the binding was nicely attached, and will continue to get more secure as the glue cures overnight. I suspect this method wicked some CA into the fret slots, but I have a tool that should be able to pick that out.

Here's the fretboard on the neck:

And the neck and fretboard on the guitar: 

I'm very happy with how the binding looks. I'll add the small piece at the bottom of the fretboard once it's finally finish sanded.

The next jobs are, unfortunately, more sanding on the fretboard. It's currently at 120 grit - I need to take it up towards 600 grit. Following that, I'll probably try to finish the neck - shaping and drilling the tuner holes.

I also need to make a decision about the headstock logo - whether to use a decal, or attempt to inlay something...