Finally Back to Work on My First Build

Thanks to illness, family matters, school work (I teach at my local community college), and life in general, I've been otherwise engaged for a couple of weeks. This afternoon, I managed to get a few hours work in, and took a few pics as I went along.   9353882090?profile=original

I finished shaping the headstock using a jigsaw, a flat file and a half-round file.  Realizing that there was still a significant amount of glue residue hanging around, I used a cabinet scraper to clean up the mess.  Then I decided to shape the neck.  I started by using a router and a rounding over bit along the back of the neck as far as I could reach.  I used a dremel with a small drum sander to rough in the rest.  I also shaped the heel around the transition from single thickness to double thickness, near where the neck enters the box.  This picture sort of shows the rough neck as finished.

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Lots of sanding left to do there, but the shape is about right.  At this point, I finally decided to cut the box opening for the neck.  I used the flush cut saw to cut the vertical lines, then drilled a hole for my coping saw blade in order to cut the bottom.

9353882694?profile=originalThe cut line is actually the gold border just below the drilled hole.  Cleaned it up with a flat file.  Here's the result:

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And the other end:

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Yep, I dropped the neck and dinged a corner, so I'll be trimming that off before I do anything more!

I also got the fretboard marked for 24 frets, made a test cut or two, and figured out where it's going to sit on the neck.  Next task will be relieving the neck under the lid, final shaping and sanding the neck thoroughly, fretting, mounting the fretboard, staining, and finishing.  Oh yeah, and drilling the headstock, which I FORGOT to do before I glued up the scarf joint.  Gotta drag out my drill stand for that one.  So far it looks like I may succeed in using every tool I have before this is over, but it's a great learning experience.  I figure the second build will go a lot faster and easier, right, guys????

 

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Comments

  • looking great. i like the headstock. i was thinking of a scarf joint on my first build but common sense told my to give it a miss... ha ha . why is it that cutting the cigar box is one of the most nerve wracking things in a build?

  • second, the 3rd, 4th and so on. Like Lays, you can't just have 1. Nice build you have going, looking forward to progress pics

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