Neck fit and peghead slots......

Today I spent some time final sanding the neck of the OM and did a test fit of it on the body. It fits pretty well, but the finish did change where the neck and body attach a tiny bit. The fit around the heel is not perfect like it was. I think I will scribe around it and try and clean out the finish so the neck sits directly on the wood like it was before the finish. All in all though, it fits nice. I took the body outside in the sunlight to get a good look at the finish and found one small spot on the lower bout where I sanded though to the sealer coat. It is about 1" x 1 1/2" spot. I hit it with a few coats of lacquer to touch it up. I will let it dry until the rest of the guitar is finished then sand it out. Other than that small spot, everything else went fine. I do have a few grain marks in the rosewood peghead that I may drop fill because they show in the sunlight.

I decided that it was time to cut the slots in the peghead of my OOO. I as a bit nervous about this but it went pretty well. I first layed out the slots on the pehgead, then drilled the 4 ends of the slots. After that, I rough cut the slots out with my scroll saw. I made a small edge guide for my dremel router base and used a 1/8" upcut bit to route the slots to within a hair of the line. Then I filed and chiseled the slots to the final size. They still need some touch up and sanding, and of course the ramping of the bottom slots. It was fun but a bit tedious.

Here is the OOO peghead marked for the slots.

I drilled 4 holes at the ends of the slot locations.

After the rough cuts of the slots on my scroll saw.

After a lot of routing, filing, and chiseling. The slots are pretty close to done. I still need to ramp the bottoms of the slots, and do a final sanding but it is close.

This is my high tech fence for the stewmac router base. It is a piece of pine screwed to the base.

I wanted to see that the holes lined up and the angles were correct. I dug out some bits and allen wrenches and put them in. Everything lines up perfectly.

Here is the neck fit on the OM. Note the tiny gap towards the left. I think cleaning the finish off will take care of this. On this side you can also see the blotchyness I ended up with on the heel. It isn't too bad by it definitely is visable. The big blotch in the center of the heel is actually a reflection of a window across the shop.

The fretboard extension sits nice and flat on the top.

The other side of the heel. You can see a tiny gap towards the fingerboard. These gaps are very tiny and not very noticeable with the naked eye. They are much more pronounced with the closeup of a camera.

The heal cap. This joint looks pretty good.

It dawned on my that I didn't post a picture of the top yesterday. Here it is after finish sanding. I really like that bearclaw look.