Neck carving

So I decided to take a break from carving the body, the planes were killin my hands, and I decided since there was still 2.5 hours left to work on the neck. I'll just post all the pics of the progress since I've already detailed before how I do it.

Carving the top

So sunday I actually got there on time. First thing to do was flush rout the body since the cap was cut out slightly larger.

Now that i look at it, that was the before picture, and there was no after between here and the next step. So after flush routing, the cap got routed down to where the body bindings will sit as a referrence point for the top carving.

After that, I got to carving. Ian had let me use his palm planes so it would go a little faster. Mine is only like 18mm I think, he's got one 2-3x that size. Aftermaking progress around the edge, I used rasps and sanding dowels to smooth it out before starting again. I'll just put up all the pics of the progress in action now.


I'll just post those to keep this less graphic heavy. I'll post the neck pics in a different post in a minute.

Massive progress

So I did the weekend seminar on construction at school. 15 hours of working, although I realistically probably worked half that cuz i kept having to take breaks cuz the tools chew up my hands. I'm not sure if I have pics of every step, but there's a ton.

First thing I did saturday was cut and fine tune the neck tenon, then glue the fretboard on and cut out the neck taper.

While the glue was setting on that, Ian helped me glue my Sequoia cap onto the chambered body. We used a bunch of scraps of wood left over from his Horn speakers so the clamps wouldn't dig into the figured wood.

So while that was setting, after taking the neck off the caul, I glued some ears on the sides of the headstock to accomodate my modified Mosrite shape. I had the good idea to join the edges before cutting em out so that they'd glue on without a lot of sanding.

Since the ears weren't completely precise, I had to do a bit of sanding so when I safety plane the back to uniform thickness, the ears won't go flying off. After that I got the template worked out and transfered and we cut out the headstock shape. I had Ian do that since I'm still getting used to the bandsaw and needed to see how to do it on an angle like that. But here's the shape, a little oversized to accomodate for refinement and routing.

I'll do all the sunday work in another post, since its mostly just arch carving.

Keep an eye out for new posts

I'm in the inlay and engraving workshop now, and doing a few more construction sessions as well so I can finish up my archtop. Can't wait to get that thing done so I can play it.

Got a new toy today

w00t, new bandsaw. Hopefully picking up some more tools next week.