Attaching the Neck, Stabilizing the Basswood, and....Guitar?

I took the day off today because I've got a couple days to burn before the end of the year.  Also I was hoping the USPS would deliver the EMG pickups.  Alas - they did not.  My postage consultant drove right on by without even providing me with any junk mail.  I swore out loud, loudly.

Saturday and Sunday I attached the neck using 10-24 steel threaded inserts from McFeely's.  The reasoning here is that the basswood is soft and shreds easily:  the last thing I need is for the neck screws to tear right out, despite the structure provided by the composite layers.  I would use 6 inserts to spread the load even more.  The thought of this operation had me sweating and twitching, because I would be drilling 6 large holes in the heel of my neck, the neck that has taken me 9 months to make, and there would be very little chance of going back if I goofed it up.

I drilled through the body  into the neck, then widened the holes for the inserts.  Driving the inserts in was an imprecise process and it pushed some of the upper-layer basswood around, but nothing fatal.  I countersunk the body for the screws, which I alluded to in a previous out-of-order post.

Then I put some of that thin Zap CA around the threaded inserts and into the tuner holes to stabilize the soft basswood - worked fine, though I did have to run a solvent-wet neck bolt into the inserts to clear out some CA/sawdust crust.  I also hit the screw holes for the LSR nut, but I tested that process on 1/16" holes drilled in a piece of junk laminate - I didn't want to find out that the CA completely plugged them.  I needn't have worried.  Thin doesn't even begin to describe that stuff.

So here we are, Monday.  After I didn't get the pickups, I sulked for quite a while.  My whole day - ruined!  Waaaaah!

Then I got to work.  Time to string this thing.  I had a set of D'Addario 10s around for my S-500.  I reinstalled the saddles that I removed from the bridge in order to screw the bridge to the body.  I installed the LSR nut with all 8 provided shims, after reaming out the 1/16" screw holes to clear any wayward CA.  I installed the tuners after reaming out the holes again with a 3/8" bit to clear out the CA crust. The tuners took me a while to figure out but ended up performing perfectly.

Then I tuned the guitar by ear to my S-500.  I tightened up the truss rod to take out the relief put in by the strings (I'm grateful the strings are able to work the neck).  Bridge:

Nut and headstock:

Truss rod spoke nut:

Neck bolts:

And...guitar?

How does it sound, without the pickups?  Well, it sounds thin.  I'm not impressed.  But when I push on the body (into the carpet or the top of the work bench) to damp it down, it deepens up nicely.  Clearly I gotta put some more heavy wood on this thing.  I was toying with the idea of making a Steinberger inspired body, but that clearly is not happening, and not just because of the resonance.  I'm not comfortable with how it rested in my hands.  So it's going to get more guitarlike.  But I do like the face that it's square on bottom, so it doesn't fall over - that's what I've always liked about the Vs.

Body Shaping and Headstock Thickness

First I had to make the headstock thicker for the tuners.  1/2" wasn't going to give the tuner nuts enough to grab onto.  I epoxied a layer of 1/16" basswood onto the face of the headstock in an interesting fashion:

I figured I'd add to the front face of the headstock because I already had some extra string break angle over the standard Fender headstock.  This addition is raised and might look interesting.  Why not?  We'll see how it goes.

Then I set about to fix up the mahogany body.  First I sanded the glue drippings off the join lines.  Then I opened up the neck pocket for high-fret access.  Then I evened up the end of the body.  Then, because the body is 2" thick, quite a bit thicker than your average, I graded down to the neck pocket.  I did this with the bandsaw and a 1/2" skip-tooth blade.  For the first time I felt I really understand what a band saw is all about - this was like doing geometry, like sculpting with a laser.  The combination of easily-sawable wood with a blade perfectly suited to the task is a dream.

The end of the body is about 1" thick, which is the thickness of my S-500 under the neck pocket.  I re-cut the countersinks for the neck bolts.

Doesn't that look cool?

Mahogany Body and Neck Pocket

I want the center core of the body to be a good solid type of "tone wood".  I went to the local Ring's End and they had 3 feet of 5/4 by 6" mahogany.  I don't know mahogany but this stuff looked nice to me, and it is moderately hefty.

I cut it in half and glued it to itself with Franklin Tightbond.  I didn't do a very good job.  That stuff went on like peanut butter and I slathered it.  When I clamped, the boards started sliding off each other.  I ended up drilling a couple of small holes in each end (very fast) and inserting some thin smooth bolts through the holes (tightly fitting), then piling a bunch of weight on the resulting stack.

The glue line is thick as hell.  It left some annoying gaps around one edge.  I'm going to have to fix this up somehow.  But it's not going anywhere, I think.  I know there's enough glue in the center.  There's nothing simple for me - I can't even glue a board to a board without getting all turned around and confused.

Then I cut the neck pocket.  I started by placing the neck on the end of mahogany, centered it, and drew some outlines in pencil.  I freehand routed a quarter inch down inside these lines, try to draw good clean edges, until I realized that would never, ever work - I was going to put it into the wall and wreck the pocket.  So, like usual, I made a jig:

I always make a jig.  Viewed one way, this whole project has been an endless succession of single purpose jigs.  I made this one by clamping those two long boards to the sides of the guitar neck at the heel, laying it on the body core, and clamping and nailing everything together like a Rube Goldberg device.  You can see where I had to hack away chunks of the crosspiece to make some router base clearance.  I extended the pocket about a centimeter to make room for the truss rod spoke nut sticking out the neck heel.  Here's the completed neck pocket with the Freud 1/2" flush cut top-bearing router bit:

The neck fits well.  Not only well - it fits beautifully.  It fits so tightly and firmly that I feel like I have no right to such a wonderful neck pocket, not the way I cut it:

Then I ordered parts for the next phase:  attaching the neck to the body and installing bridge/pickups.  I'm going to use threaded inserts for this because I don't trust the soft basswood with bare wood screws.  I had some brass ones lying around, and I'm glad I tried installing one in some scrap neck laminate, because it broke off at its drive screw slot.  Brass is no good for this.

I ordered a box of 10 steel threaded inserts from McFeely's, 10-24 with a 5mm hex drive and 9/32 outer hole size.

I ordered two pickups through Amazon:  an EMG 81TWX and a 89XR.  These are both dual-mode pickups, each containing a humbucker and a single coil in switchable arrangement.  They come with push-pull volume pots to toggle between modes, as well as active tone controls and all the wiring I should need.

TOTAL COST SO FAR:

$592 - Previous steps
$38 - 3 board feet of 5/4 x 6 mahogany
$24 - flush cut router bit
$5 - steel threaded inserts
$260 - EMG pickups
-------------------
$919 total cost so far


OUCH.  I figured I'd spend about a grand.  But actually doing it is totally depressing.

Nut and Tuners

I finished cutting the nut slot to width for the LSR nut.  I used a pull saw to get it close, and a file with masking tape on its short side to get the width correct (so I could take off material on the vertical face of the slot, without digging it any deeper).  I used needle files to flatten the bottom of the slot.  By the time I'd finished, the fit was tight but i'd undercut the slot on the bass side toward the first fret, just slightly.  No big deal I think.

This nut doesn't have fore and aft pressure on it like a locking nut, even thought it might look similar.  The nut has little pairs of ball bearings for each string to slide upon. So the two provided screws, tiny though they are, will hold it fine.  The instructions say to use some weird-ass drill size, and only that size - the danger, according to the instructions, is in twisting the screw head off.   I used a 1/16" which is a few hundredths too small, because I always think I know better.  It worked fine.  I put a little fishing reel oil on the threads before I put them in.  I used all of the shims provided.  If that's not enough, I'll make my own shims out of feeler gauges.

Then it was time to mark the location of the tuner holes.  The first method I used worked very poorly:  it consisted of push pins with fishing line between them running in the approximate position of real strings.  It was too hard to eyeball the lie over the nut angle, and too hard to mark the lines on the headstock under the fishing line.

Next I made a jig to suspend a length of aluminum angle stock over the neck from the heel end, and taped a piece of paper to the neck with the correct string spacing (gotten from my G&L S-500, which has nearly the same dimensions).

I used my trusty 6" ruler to drop the vertical down to the paper on the heel end, and to the headstock in two places on the other end.  This worked well because that ruler centered itself well in the ball bearings of the nut:

The I double-checked everything and made the lines:

You can see my attempt to sanity check the spacing.  I put the line delineating the row of tuner hole centers across the string lines, then measured the distance between each of the holes. I was a little annoyed and disturbed by the fact that they weren't perfectly regular, and that more importantly that the intervals got bigger going toward the nut/bass side.  Then I realized they should get wider because the string lines are a wee bit farther apart toward the nut, as they converge from heel to nut.  Okay.  Good enough?  It had better be, let me tell you.

Basswood doesn't like to be drilled.  It shreds a bit.  The tuner holes are 3/8", as specified by the StewMac instructions for the Steinberger Gearless tuners.

I brought the neck upstairs to look at it in daylight, thinking that it was nice-enough looking to be treated like family, finally.  It was at this moment that I nearly lost it:  I realized that the direct line from the nut to the centerline of each tuner goes right through the string-clamping knob on the tuner to the left, if that clamping knob comes to rest perpendicular to the string lie!  I was all like, "Oh BLEEPETY BLEEP BLEEP, you BLEEPETY BLEEPER!"

I was stumped and very worried.  I searched the internet to little avail, but did discover many pictures of these tuners on standard Fender 6-in-line headstocks.  I compared my headstock to the S-500, and it looked very similar, both in tuner spacing and cross-string angle. Yes, I could put some other tuners on there, but these things were bloody expensive!  WTF?  I clamped a string into the bass tuner and discovered two things:

1. Probably, if the clamping knob is perpendicular, I can muscle it around another quarter turn to make it parallel
2. Because of the peculiar spaghetti-slurping operation of these tuners (pulling the string down into a hole), the clamping knobs wouldn't always be in the full down position - room for strings to go under them

I'm relying on point 1, because point 2 depends on it - wouldn't want to tighten a string, dragging a clamping knob down into the next highest string and bollocksing up the works. I think it'll be okay.  

The nearly-completed neck:

Next I'm going to start working on the body.  It's time to:

1. get this thing strung up and arranged properly
2. pickups in
3. frets leveled
4. intonation and setup
5. take it all back down and put it into its final shape, which means headstock shape, proper contours, body shape
6. finished all wood parts with whatever stains or coatings I decide to apply

I'm ordering the pickups in the next week or so.  The bill for that ain't gonna be pretty.  More later.

Fret Not - Refretting a Brand New Neck, and Breakthroughs

I knew putting the frets in would be fraught with danger, and that I would do a less-than-perfect job.  Accordingly, I launched into it without even thinking and put the frets in with a plastic faced hammer after bending the fret wire.  I forgot to round over the sharp edges of the fretboard.  Some of the frets didn't seat well.  I beveled the edges of the fret slots too deep in places.  When I ran my file along the side of the fretboard, some of the frets rocked in their slots under my fingers.  All kinds of little things went wrong.  It was another low point in the journey.

Enough of uncertainty!  I decided to remove the frets and refret the neck already.  This time, I'd glue them in like a freak.  I've read all about the right way to do it, and that gluing is not required.  And how, if I ever want to refret this thing for real in the future, gluing can contribute to a bigger mess. I've read it all.  It didn't work out like that, okay?

I tapped out the frets from the edges where they hung over, because I don't have a pair of end-nippers that's totally flush-ground.  Of course the fingerboard chipped out in several places.  All the chips stayed where they belonged except for one, by the edge, which I will fill later with an epoxy/rosewood dust mixture.

First I rounded the fretboard edges properly.  Then I cleaned out the fret slots with a pull saw, deepening them slightly to accommodate glue in capillary fashion.  I surmised that the reason for some of the unseated frets was inadequate curvature of the fretwire, especially near the nut; I had enough fretwire left (almost a whole 2 foot length) to increase the curvature and redo 1-5 new.  Others I rested in a concave cut at the end of a 1x4 and tapped with the hammer to bend deeper.  The rest just went in.  There was enough grab left in the fret slots to hold them flush.

After I was satisfied that the frets were seated well, I put a fine tip on the glue and went off the hook.  This stuff is so watery it wicked everywhere.  I think it shows in the following picture:  some of it went down the grain from deep inside the fret slots and popped out in random endgrains in the area between frets, like running down a wormhole.  Amazing.

Well, they ain't going anywhere.  Sure, it looks crappy.  I'll try some toluene to clean it up.  While the glue was curing, I made the rough cuts to widen the nut slot for the LSR roller nut, which is wider than a regular nut and pushes toward the first fret.  I made the vertical cut freehand with the pull saw, and the bottom cut with a coping saw.  I would never have done either of those things before I started this project, but I was able to do it and not screw it up.  Yes, I'll be cleaning up the slot with needle files (very carefully).  No, it's far from perfect.  Yes, it will take me longer than it takes anybody else.  But I'm going to cut a really good nut slot freehand, and it's going to work well and look nice when I'm finished.  That's amazing to me.  I'm learning a lot.

I discovered something incredibly new about filing today that's also blindingly obvious.  While beginning the process of filing the fret edges flush to the fretboard, I started to get discouraged.  It's a lot of work, and those frets are hard.  Maybe they're not stainless, but they're not very soft either.  But by running the file down the frets until they were all about the same height, I found it going faster than I imagined it would.  I realized that when I took care to keep all the fret overhangs even, the file works on them all at the same time, and long even strokes do all the work magically.  I knew that, but now I really know it in my bones.  It's one of those little things that open my eyes a bit.

Currently I'm still evening the fret edges.  My file is not attached to a board like those fancy ones you can buy, so it's not as smooth as it could be.  But I'm using what I've got, which I got for free.  After that I'll bevel them a bit (less is more - you can't put it back) and clean up some of the CA.

Bending Fretwire and the Start of Fret Installation

Fret wire must be bent to approximately the radius of the neck at the fret in which it is to be installed.  Most authorities suggest bending it a little tighter than that.  In my case, I've got a conical (compound) radius neck that goes from 10" at the nut to about 14" radius at the end of the board.  I settled on 9" as a good radius for the whole thing.

Bending fret wire is not a simple matter of grabbing both ends and pulling them together into a circular shape.  I know, I tried it!  What happens is that the wire starts to bend non-asymmetrically, so that tang that is supposed to go into the fret slot is not perpendicular to the plane of the bend.  In fact, there is no plane of the bend, the thing starts to curl up.  Above all the fret wire must be straight when viewed from the top, and a curlicue ain't gonna cut it.

Inspired by fret benders described at various places on the internet (themselves apparently inspired by this fancy StewMac version), I made my own.  It's stupid looking:

The metal roller is two larger washers with a thin small washer between them - this makes a slot for the fret tang to ride in.  The two rubber rollers are (I think) part of the suspension system for a ceiling fan.  You would force the wire through the bent path so that its face runs against the rubber rollers and the fret tang rides in the metal washer roller.  Unfortunately, when you try to use it like this, the crummy little axles (a 3" threaded rod and two 5/16" utility knife handles) go all non-perpendicular and the wire starts bending wrong and gets bound up in the washer slot.

So I made it a two-sided contraption with 1" pine for spacers and the roller axles going through both pieces:

Well, it worked!  I guessed at the distance between the metal roller and the line drawn between the axles of the rubber rollers.  The produced a radius of about 12" or so (estimated).  In the next picture you can see the fret wire near a 9" radius line drawn on a plastic table:

Then I drilled new holes in the boards so I could move the metal roller about 1/4" closer to the line connecting the rubber rollers.  Then I'd run the wire through the new configuration:

And tighten the radius in stages.  Important?  I don't know.  Accidental?  Completely.  This second bending stage did the trick almost perfectly:

Then I modified my 60lb bag of tube sand  (yes, tube sand - apparently we have that in Connecticut) into a 25lb bag of sand, to use as a neck rest when I hammer the frets in:

Very exciting!  A whole day spent bending some wire - but it was free, and it could have turned out far, far worse.

Fingerboard Attachement and Neck Profiling

I made a lot of progress and failed to document it.  I got excited, and I wanted to get a lot done this week.

The fingerboard is attached to the neck.  I first cut it almost to width.  I put a staple in either end of the neck, pulled one leg of each out, and cut them into a low point.  This helped to locate the fingerboard on the neck when I pressed it to the neck face.  I then wrapped the neck with 3 yards of waistband elastic from a craft store - I got the idea from a StewMac how-to email, but I declined to buy a full pound of 40" elastic bands from them.  What would I ever do with them?  After that I placed a straightedge on the face of the board and weighed it down.

The back is nearly profiled:

I clamp the neck to the edge of the workbench like so, on a piece of hardboard with some carpet padding on it to protect the fingerboard:

The epoxy layers actually help the contouring process - when they're roughly parallel or diverging at a constant angle, you're making a regular shape.  The neck is going to be a pretty pronounced vee shape.  There are two reasons for this:

1. Easier for me to profile - flat is simpler than curved
2. I need to keep the neck thickness pretty high overall to keep enough wood/glass back of the truss rod, so the rod doesn't blow out, but that makes for a very chunky neck.  I can get my hand around it better if I flatten the curve and make a vee
3. Bonus reason:  it just happened and there's no going back

I'm doing all this work with the Surform loaded with a convex grater, and a round rat tail file with big teeth.  It makes a giant mess, but the bits are heavier than air and thus far less dangerous.