Truss Rod Installation and Fingerboard Prep

I installed the truss rod per StewMac instructions, with dabs of silicone at each end and a couple points in the middle.  I didn't know how close to get on top-to-bottom clearance of the brass end blocks in the slots, so I shimmed them up 8 thousandths with two tiny sheets of steel snipped and filed from an old feeler gauge.

Since they were under the silicone, I figure they won't rattle.  If they do, I can always remove the guitar neck, make careful preparations, and light the POS on fire.

The next day I cut the fingerboard edges to the taper of the neck.  I did this by laying the face of the neck, which is just about to final width, on the un-curved back of the fingerboard.  I centered it and ran a pencil down both edges.  Then had a problem, because I wanted to use the bandsaw but didn't want the down-running blade to pull chips out of the fingerboard face.  Even with tape I was concerned about that.  So I transfered the lines to the front, which is inexact - the lines on back were a copy of the neck taper, but the lines on the front would be perfectly straight like my straightedge.  Now, I made those edges as straight as I could with sandpaper and my Surform cheesegrater, but it's still not the same.  So I resolved to leave the pencil marks when I cut from the top of the fingerboard.

It worked okay.  Here's the neck with truss rod installed, and the tapered fingerboard:

Here's the spoke nut of the truss rod sticking out the heel of the neck:

I couldn't figure out how to drill a 3/8" hole into one edge of a 7/32" notch.  For a week I carried the neck in my car, thinking to ask someone if I could borrow a drill press.  I kept forgetting, and also wondered if there'd be a way to clamp such a long piece end-on - maybe by turning the work table vertical and rotating it out of the vertical axis of the drill, clamping the neck to the vertical work table at a careful angle?  Then finally I decided to just make it happen freehand, even if I had to hand-ream the thing with a naked drill bit.  I used an electric hand drill with a 5/16" bit that I placed into the deep end of the slot, measuring the center as carefully as I could.  I used this bit a little like a drill and a little like a file.  Then I moved up to the 3/8" and repeated the operation carefully.  It worked.

This highlights another issue I have with any long-running project:  fatigue.  On the one hand, I knew I could get away with screwing up the hole in the heel of the neck a little bit, because it would hardly be visible.  On the other hand, I could have done it much more safely, for instance by clamping a 3/4" thick piece of hardwood across the end of the neck and drilling through it as a proxy piece of wood (compensating for the empty slot).  I didn't find out about that trick until after I used the drill.

I am most vulnerable to the temptation to take a shortcut when:

1. I've been blocked for some time  from working on the project, either by technical barriers or lack of time, and I feel the need to "catch up" to some imaginary timetable
2. There seems to be no one correct, clean way to approach the task, and no way for me to decide between the two, other than by making somebody else do the work

Any project, large or small, can be seen as a struggle to take exactly the time required by me to do the job as safely and correctly as possible, no more or less.  Once I start comparing my performance to some mythical notion I have in my head, I'm liable to go all freestyle.  Sometimes that works.

I am a monkey.

Finalish Neck Thicknessing

I wanted to make the headstock 1/2" thick, and main part of the neck 3/4".  I could have done it a couple ways, I guess:

1. Band saw the wide way, then clean up with the router and thickness fixture
2. Route in increments until complete

I don't trust my band saw skills or my band saw setup enough for the first approach.  The second approach, however, filled my entire basement workshop area with a fine sawdust.  Why was I not informed about this?  It's everywhere.  Everywhere!  In fact, I thought I would be working on this guitar until I died of old age, but now I think I'm racing against lung disease.  Thankfully, I think that was the last of the major thicknessing operations.

Here's the nasty-looking step-down in back of the nut, which will need some serious work with the Stanley Surform cheese grater:

I think I'll clean up some of these messes and then see about finishing up the truss rod and attaching the fingerboard, in preparation for fretting.

Shaping the Neck to Almost Final Width

The band saw I used was not accurate enough to make the neck sides perfectly flat or straight, and really blaming the tool is rather sad.  It's because of me.  So now I have to take the sides down.  I use a Stanley Surform with a flat grater to get pretty close, and then 120 grit sandpaper for the final approach.  However, the amount of surface area is key to sanding progress so I began to profile the back of the neck so I didn't have to flatten all that wood.  Like so:

I made a thing to hold the neck on its side where I can grate it properly:

I grate the neck with a Stanley Surform.  It gets pretty good traction if I apply a little pressure.  I think the fibergass/epoxy layer gives it a hard time.

Summary of Guitar Build So Far

This is the build summary so far:

1.  Project overview and basic neck materials:  Fiberglass, two-part epoxy and basswood
2.  Making a heat box for curing the epoxy
3.  Assembling and curing the laminate
4. How not to cut the laminate, part one and part two
5. And God created the band saw
6. A whole bunch of parts arrive
7. A guitar-like shape occurs
8. Flattening the laminate
9. Cutting the truss rod channel

Cutting a Truss Rod Slot

It's time to cut the truss rod slot, because the back of the neck is still flat and the face of the neck is just about ready for the fingerboard.  Next I think I have to thickness the back of the "thin part" of the neck down to 3/4", but leave the headstock material there, and once I do that, things will get rough in Flatworld. Once I do this, I'll never be able to lay the neck flat again easily:

The next operation after that will involve gluing on the fingerboard, profiling the back of the neck (into an approximate "C" shape) or both, and the neck will start getting lumpy, bumpy, rounded and so forth.

I had trouble routing this laminate before (see here), but I think that was because I took too much at a time.  I've successfully routed into and through epoxy layers in my thicknessing operations, leading me to believe that if I go slow I won't start any fires.  So I made a setup to guide the router:

I got the correct 7/32" router bit at Ring's End.  I checked the aluminum for straightness.  I took into account that my router base has a radius of slightly less than 3" (2 63/64" or so).  I measured with a metal ruler that goes down to 64ths.  As my grandfather never would have said, "measure 2,028,887 times, cut 2300 times."  I tried to always keep the router pinned to the guide, but without pushing hard enough to risk moving the guide itself.  I cut in small increments, about five passes.  And still I screwed it up!  

Excellent.

That's the truss rod, laying next to its future home.  I created two problems, both recoverable:

1. The slot is about 1/64th to the right of where it should be.  This is due to me being a poor craftsman and a bad judge of distances.   But I've haven't filed the neck to its final width, and I have that much room over on the right if I want it.
2. I goofed up twice and the bit cut toward me in two spots.  Not too terrible; I think it's visible in the image.  I'm going to hide that under the fingerboard.  This happened because I was trying to push back hard, but not too hard, while moving the router left, but not too quickly, while also thinking about how horrible it would be if I screwed up.

Whew.

Using the Custom Board Flattening Router Jig...Thingy

Well!  All I can say is, don't do this.  Not at home, even.  Certainly don't post it on the internet, because sure as the sun comes up, somebody is going to laugh at you.  FYI, I had to take the two center braces off again (drilling out rivets and making new holes) to space the center part wide enough to fit the headstock.  I am extremely tired of aluminum and pop rivets.

This silly little plastic-coated MDF folding table is the single best (usable by me) oasis of flatness in my house!  You should have seen me with the carpenter's square, measuring the basement floor and every beaten-up old desk (there are two).  This thing was a miracle where I least expected it.  But it's not perfect, and certainly the board I'm working on isn't either, so when I clamped the headstock end, I had to weight down the middle to press the other end to the surface.  The dumbbell weights are balanced across the neck on a piece of mild steel left over from a previous laughable project.  This configuration gets me additional clearance for my router grips as I work from the side.

Then I put the weights on the end and did the middle.  I came up with some reasonable flatness.  It's still bowed down in the middle a little, and I have theories as to why, but I don't really care.  I'm calling it good because it's even and reasonably consistent.  I can adjust it with the truss rod, or externally, when it's time to level the frets.  I will probably apply some 220-grit paper to my 1/4" glass and clean it up ever so slightly, then I'll call it good.

I got into the periphery of the epoxy zone at the boundary of this slice of 1/16" basswood - you can see the blue.  I've got a couple of choices here:

1. Epoxy on another fiberglass/basswood layer and give myself some wood to glue onto (with the obligatory flattening step, which may not work because that much wood might well make the piece too thick to fit under my flattening jig)
2. Glue the fingerboard on with epoxy.  Sounds good to me.  If I find myself with a guitar neck that's so screwed up that I am facing the prospect of taking the fretboard back off, I'm pretty much going to be starting again probably.

This was a very tense operation for me.  One serious mistake and I'd have been facing a total do-over, which isn't as bad as it sounds:  I think I could get back to this point within a week if I had to, knowing what I know now (and having what I have now).  But I really, really didn't care to find out.  Now I've got to be doubly careful of those nice sharp corners.  The neck piece is acquiring delicacy along with its flatness.  Very strange.

Custom Board Flattening Router Jig

I had an idea.  I made a jig for my router that sits over the board and may or may not flatten the face of the neck.

I got some angle aluminum and 3/16" pop rivets and a pop rivet gun.  I looked at the angle steel but it was not even remotely straight, and I have no good way of cutting it.  I cut the aluminum with a hacksaw, as most of the lengths were longer than the 12" my band saw can accommodate.  I made the bracket you see, minus the two inner struts parallel to the guitar neck.  A bracket that wide would be versatile - that was my reasoning.  It would be good for all kinds of flattening jobs.

It made a clean test cut, but the router dipped in the middle and the face of the test board was concave or cupped.  So I added those two inner braces, 3" apart, to keep the sag down.  Along the way, I put rivets in the wrong places, facing the wrong way, drilled them out poorly, you name it.  In addition I somehow inserted the tip of a brand new hobby knife (#11) into the meat at the heel of my thumb, and my unused 3/16" drill bit got dull already.  

Good times.

This is what the router would see, if a router had eyes and a nervous system:

I'm going to have to pick up a piece of 1"x3" or similar, find a truly flat place to stage this (maybe my dad's table saw table), and flatten at least a one-foot length.  Only then will I feel reasonably safe in trying to flatten my guitar neck.

How (Not) to Flatten a Piece of Wood

I want to glue the fretboard to the neck, but I want the neck to be very flat and true first.  The fact is, however, this board is not flat.  The fiberglass/epoxy layers are probably more compressed in some places than others, the basswood probably wasn't exactly 1/16" thick everywhere - this is how it goes.

Near the start of this in a post entitled "Disaster...Or Victory?", you can see that I set up my laminate on a sheet of 1/4" plate glass.  This very typical and common type of glass is sometimes called float glass for its habit of being created on a pond of molten tin.  Molten tin!  So it's generally considered pretty flat.  The idea was, lay the laminate up on a perfectly flat sheet, weight it down against that sheet, and you get a board with at least one perfectly flat face!

Well that didn't work out so good.  Somehow it didn't happen, some entity or phenomenon got between my float glass and my laminate, and it just didn't work out that way.  So I have to flatten this board.  I'm naive so I figured I could just rub the board against some sandpaper affixed to that very same piece of glass, and make it flat.  But only the actual neck part - the headstock is going to get rebated away anyhow.  First mistake:  I should have taken the headstock down first by sawing, to get it out of the way.

For a while I had the glass on a carpet and pushed down on the board, as I rubbed it around in circles.  I drew in pencil on the board to see where I was taking off material - where the high spots were.  After about 40 minutes at 120 grit, I did get to a point where the sandpaper had cleaned up the whole board, but all was not perfect.  There was still a low spot in the middle of the neck!  I hypothesize that by pushing down on the piece, I flexed it into contact with the glass, thus taking more off the part directly under my hand.  In some strange way, the high parts escaped.  Perhaps, also, the glass was flexing into the carpet.  One thing I did right:  I constantly swept the sandpaper and the board clean to prevent little piles of dust from glomming onto the paper, forcing the wood up over it.  Here's the board with pencil writing on it:

But it was much better than before, clearly.  I was still hopeful.  Time to adjust my attack.  This time I placed the glass on a long level and gave it some new sandpaper, still 120 grit.  And - here's my innovation - I didn't press down on the board, I just pushed it gently from either end, back and forth.  And I checked it with a straight edge regularly.  And lo! it got even better.  But all was still not perfect, in fact I had a totally new problem:

I don't know if you can see it here, but the left side is thicker than the right.  The top may be flat, but the whole thing is canted over.  My cheap but cool digital micrometer is AWOL due to a battery condition right now, so I can't tell you exactly how much.  1/3 of a millimeter?  Something like that.  Is this a problem?  Well, two things:

1. The damn thing's still not straight enough.  I want it about as perfect as possible, because if the fretboard goes on flat then in theory I will have to spend less time leveling the frets.
2. I don't want it tilted over.  That irritates me.  I'm building a simple guitar, not some fancy ergonomic thing.

I still have enough wood to stop and figure out what to do.  Fender neck blanks are sold 13/16" thick, and this one is about 15/16".  The only trick is I don't want to stop on an epoxy/glass layer, or partway through one, as that'll force me to change my choice of glue from Titebond to epoxy.  Big deal?  Dunno.  And I'm not sure many machines will be happy cutting through a nasty layer of garbage like that.

In any case, I'm reaching out for help here while I've still got room to move.  I'll post more when I get the guidance I need.  You'd be surprised how hard it is to find answers to this on the internet.  You're either supposed to use a giant plane with ninja woodworking technique, or you're supposed to have an electric thickness planer.  Even to use the planer, I'd have to prop up the other side of the board (which is even worse than this one) artfully in a facsimile of a flat surface to give the planer something to push against.  I suspect I'm going to end up with a belt sander and a sanding frame, or some homemade router rig set up on a table saw table.

I have discovered this:  the concept of flatness is a human one.  It is a state known only to water on the calmest of days.  It's a strange place to be, knowing exactly what I think I want in a very geometric way, and being unable to arrive at that configuration.

I am a monkey.

First True Cuts, Or, Something Reminds Me of a Guitar

With all the ingredients in place I decided to put a blade on the band saw and make my first meaningful cuts - all the previous cuts were to clean up the laminate, or test a theory.

I put the Lenox Neo-Type blade on the bandsaw, because it's 3/8" wide vs. the Zona's 1/4", and I have a theory that it would be more boxed in by the blade guides for these critical cuts.  At first I thought it was too big, but it tightened in nicely. I used the blade tension indicator on the saw and left it right at the marker for 3/8" blades.  Though I wouldn't trust that indicator with my life, it seemed to work pretty good today.  I put the guides in pretty tight and set the bearings close behind the blade - they spun continuously while I was cutting, but hardly at all when I wasn't.  I trued the table with a square and made a test cut.

Nice test cut, nearly perfect 90 degrees.  Ooh la la.

I marked up the board based on the measurements from Warmoth and some double-checking I did with the LSR nut and the neck on my G&L S-500, which is different in length but not in scale or width.

Then I fired it up.  I left the pencil lines, because there's no way in hell I'm getting away without sanding to the final width (after I profile the back of the neck, leaving much less to sand).  With a circular saw you might slice right to your target, but me with a band saw?  Not so much.  I fed slow and carefully.  There's an interesting hysteresis in making these cuts, because band saws cut at an angle to the theoretical line of the blade.  When I turn too fast away from my current path, it takes time to get started on the turn, and then it overshoots, and then it takes more time to get back then I think it ought.  And overshoots again, if I'm not thinking ahead.  I think that's because the blade has a finite width (in this case 3/8") and takes time to go around corners.  Splitting the distance and putting my line in the "natural" path of the blade must be a skill that I don't know yet.

I did alright.  Good enough, I believe.

That old saw (odam!) about "just get rid of anything that doesn't look like a guitar" comes to mind.  I am really happy with these cuts.  These cuts don't suck.  I was also worried about air voids in the laminate layers, but looking around the edge of the piece I don't see any such.  It's a clean, tight wood/epoxy/glass sandwich.

Next up:  I'm not sure.  I have to think about it.  Maybe cutting the truss rod slot while it still has a flat back.  Maybe first beveling off the back perhaps 15 degrees (in effect, starting the shaping/profiling process early) in order to remove some wood, then get these edges straight and true and relatively final, while leaving plenty of flat on the back to easily cut the truss rod slot.

Also, this thing seems very strong.  On the one hand, I have no idea how much an unprofiled maple neck of similar dimensions bends when you stand on it in the middle with the ends up on blocks, but this one doesn't seem to deflect much at all.  I was somewhat surprised.  Is that a good thing?  Who knows?

It doesn't matter right now.  Today was good, and I'm going to leave it that way.

Fender Neck Dimensions from Warmoth

Finally, after weeks of fruitless googling, I found the magic place to get overall neck dimensions.  This page is genius, absolute genius:

http://www.warmoth.com/Guitar/Necks/faq2.aspx

I now know how wide the heel should be, how long from nut to heel, thickness at heel, depth of neck pocket.  I'm very grateful to Warmoth for having this out there.  Without this, I'd have had to go to the music store with a ruler and still not bought anything; or I might have made up my own neck format.  This way, if the neck ever breaks and I'm too tired to make another, I can get an affordable, premade replacement.

I hope Warmoth don't mind that I made up a cheat sheet for myself from their images:

A Little Like the Holidays

I made some choices.  I summoned my courage and ordered them.  It was expensive.  I had to keep reminding myself of two things:

1. This is a lifetime dream project of mine.  I don't do this often at all.  The last time I made a large non-essential purchase was about 3 years ago.
2. This gets me around half-way through the equipment purchases.  After this I just need body wood, finishing supplies, and electronics.

Here we go:  Fender-scale compound radius fingerboard from Steward MacDonald.  The slot nearest the camera is the wider nut slot (1/8" I believe).  I will have to widen that for...

Fender LSR Roller nut:

Steinberger Gearless Tuners will allow me to have a flat headstock and pull the strings right down to the headstock face (like a set of staggered-height Sperzels will do), increasing the break angle over the nut to prevent any strings from popping out:

Schaller 475, flat-mount, top-loading bridge.  I've had one of these for years on an old Yamaha, screwed to a plate over the old tremolo cavity.  It works well.  Shown with included spacer!

StewMac Hot Rod double-action truss rod, with spoke nut adjuster.  At some point I may analyze how these things work in a separate post.  There are two brass blocks on either end, and the threaded rods go into them.  They must be counter-threaded in mystical ways, because when you turn the spoke nut, the rods tension into a curve and the blocks follow.  The spoke nut will be about flush with the heel of the neck.  There will be a slot at the heel of the neck to allow adjusting the truss rod at any time through the strings.

Six feet of StewMac's widest, largest fret wire (in 2 foot lengths) and a medium/wide fret file to crown them.  I got the biggest fret wire because I want this guitar to have a "light touch", and because after I get done "leveling" the frets I'll probably have to take them to a luthier to unscrew my screwups...these won't ever run out of material.  The fret file is smooth on the flat sides and active on the edges, where you put them over the fret after you've ground it down and use it to restore the fret's round contour.

I also received two band saw blades, the first of which I talked about (and tallied up) in a previous post:

• 80" x 3/8" 14TPI NeoType Lenox from toolcenter.com.  The make these from rolls of raw blade to length.
• 80" x 1/4" 14TPI metal cutting blade from a friend who works at Zona Tool Company.  I may be checking this company out for one of their "razor saws" which look like inexpensive fine blades that I could use to help widen the nut slot for the LSR nut.  They seem to have quite a lot of neat stuff.

So you see, I've chosen:

• Flat Fender-style headstock
• 10"-14" compound radius fretboard
• Super jumbo nickel steel frets
• Fixed bridge

Now I really have to make this thing, no?  Let's talk about cost:

• Nut from amazon.com Guitar and Gear site (yes, seriously):  $30
• Fingerboard, bridge, tuners, fret wire, fret file, truss rod from StewMac: $300 (gulp)

TOTAL COST SO FAR:

$330 (this step) + $262 (previous steps) = $592

Wow.  Well this fits in roughly with my estimate of about $1000 to do this thing.  If wood for the body is about $100, and finishing supplies are about $50, that leaves me about $300 for electronics.  Of course I could've purchased a better guitar for less, which was never the point.  But still, it hurts.  I feel like I'm blowing the yearly incomes of several developing-world citizens on a whim.  There may be a special place in hell for that.