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So, I've been building for a while... 69 official guitars, (a few prototypes I didn't number), 5 Uke's, a couple oil can guitars, canjos, diddley bows, even a clamjo . . .

I'm prepping for Maker's Faire here in San Diego, and I have a booth... I'll be trying my hand at selling this time, so I figured people will want to MAKE their own.  Thus the SawBox guitar kit was born...

24" scale, Slide, poplar neck, 3 strings, Glue and screw assembly...

Since I'm building 20+ necks, I figured a template would save me tons of measuring, drawing, etc...

I found 8' poplar at Lowes, and cutting in thirds works just fine.  Seems the poplar at Lowes (though a few cents more) is much straighter than the by the foot stuff at Home Depot...  or at least I could find 8 footers that are straight...

So I took a piece of 1/8" acrylic, cut it 1.5" wide, and 4-1/8" long. (ok, it ended up that length, it works..)

The result is a single template that I can use an awl/Pencil to mark the headstock:

I dado the headstock for the kits about 1/8", using the entire template as the guide.  THen, once it's been dadoed, I use the template holes to mark the tuners, string trees, and string mounting holes at the other end.

This makes light work of marking them all!

I have made other templates... I like Gitty's Fretboard template, but the acrylic is really brittle, and the holes are 1/4", which is fine for marking, but not for drilling.  So I made my own with my fret blade in my table saw, then I drilled 1/16" holes for the fret markers.  Now I can use double sided tape to position the template on the fretboard, and quickly mark exactly where to drill the holes for 6mm inlay.

Hope this helps!

John