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...