Sometimes you just gotta sneak up to the shop.....

Well after spending most of the day doing a lot of yard work getting the place ready for next weekend's graduation party, I was able to sneak up to the shop for a few hours. The first thing I did was to get everything that I had clamped up out of the clamps and inspected the glue-ups. Everything looked very good. I decided to try a second shot at the neck block that I messed up yesterday. I trimmed it to size and then layed out the mortise. I set up the router station and routed the mortise out. I clipped the corners and sanded the mortise side to the shape of the guitar top arch. Once that was done, I glued it to the body and clamped it all up.

I then decided to work on the neck. Since the tail block is significantly larger than needed, I trimmed off some of the excess wood with my band saw. I then used something I don't usually touch, a hand plane. My abilities with a plane are poor at best, but there are some things that just require planing, or a ton of sanding. I planed the block flush to the neck blank and trimmed the end to length. I took some time doing a lot of measuring to lay out the neck arch, and the tenon. After I was convinced that I had it layed out correctly, I drilled the two bolt holes and installed the inserts. Last time I did this after I had cut the tenon, but I learned that wasn't the best way to do it because the sides of the tenon are fairly thin and want to bow out or crack while screwing in the inserts. I figured that it made sense to install the inserts while there was still a lot of wood around it. Because the epoxy needs to cure, there isn't much I can do on the neck now.

Before I left, I put my kerfing in the bender and bent it to shape. You might be scratching you head at this point asking yourself why on earth is David pre-bending the kerfing? Well, I am using reverse kerfing on this guitar and because of how it looks, I don't want to break the kerfing during installation. I started to try bending it around the body and right away I realized that it would break very easily around the waist. I got online and did some reading and found that it is common practice to pre-bend solid and reverse kerfing to minimize this problem. So I spritzed it with water, wrapped it in kraft paper, and then bent it. I will leave it in the bender until I am ready to use it.

I am still debating on what bindings I want to use. I bought a bunch of curly maple strips to bind it with, but I am kicking the idea around of going with ebony instead. I am using ebony on the head plate, on the bridge, and on the fingerboard. I am thinking that black ebony bindings would tie everything together. The only hiccup in the plan is that I want to bind the fingerboard and peg head. I can't bind it with ebony because everything else is ebony. So I am trying to decide if it would look good to have maple bindings on the neck and ebony on the body. I have to do some thinking on it.

Here is the second neck block blank. If you look closely you can see that I had to join two pieces together to make it tall enough.

The blank going through the router to make the mortise.

The mortise all cut in.

One little oops here. I originally was wanting to put the sapwood against the back, but I forgot to turn the sides over before gluing the tail block. Oh well, after reading some posts on the OLF, it seems that most guys like to put the sap wood lines against the top anyways. So I guess this oops worked out for the best.

Here is the neck block all sanded to shape and ready for glue up.

The neck block glued up and clamped.

Okay yeah, I really do own a plane, a bunch of them actually I just never use them. I am no good at tuning them as I don't have the patience for it. I have to admit though, there really is something cathartic about the feeling of the wood shavings coming up while planing. I guess I really should get more practice with them.

The neck tail block after planing. As promised, I am taking a lot of notes on this build as you can see by the yellow pad under the neck.

Here is the tenon layed out. The sections marked with an 'x' are the sections to be removed. This helps me keep it straight where the cuts need to be.

The brass inserts installed. I was much more careful this time to make sure I got them perfectly centered.

This is reversed kerfing. When it is installed it makes the kerfing look solid when looking through the sound hole. It also adds a lot of rigidity to the sides.

Orientation is important when bending. First the kerfs need to be facing up, and second two need to have the curved side point one way and the other two point the other way. This gives two mirror image pieces.