Stupid stinking rotten lousy router! I decided to go up to the shop and route the truss rod channels in the necks. Easy enough you say right..... well it is an easy job. First I layed out the center lines on the necks, installed the bit in my router, set the height and ran the first blank. At the end of the cut I started to back it out like I have done other times when it started to wander. I thought that was strange so I shut the router off and lifted the neck. That is when I realized the stinking collet loosened up and allowed the bit to rise causing the peg head end of the slot to be way too deep. At first I just figured I would fill it and re-route but then I realized that the depth of the channel is now deeper than the thickness of the final neck. Crud! Anyone need a hockey stick piece of expensive scrap wood? I did get the other neck routed as I did it before realizing that the first neck was trash. If I had figured that beforehand, I would have turned off the lights and went back in the house. As it was, that is exactly what I did after cutting the second slot (which went fine). This is the second time that I have had the bit do this in my router. The last time was on the back binding on my 000. The maddening thing is, I cleaned the collet out from dust this time when I put the bit in and made sure it was very tight. I don't know if I will keep this router or not. I can't have this thing doing this and I don't want to always be questioning if the bit will slide up the collet every time I use it.
Needless to say, this was a lousy day in the shop. I'm off to the LMI site to order another blank.
Update: Of course, as my luck would have it LMI is out of stock with these blanks. I guess I won't be buying any lottery tickets today!
Both neck blanks side by side. The one on the right is fine, the one on the left is ruined.
Here you can see the last couple of inches where the bit rose up around 10mm.
The depth of the slot at the nut end. It is about 22mm deep.
Here you can see the overall depth of the slot compared to the neck thickness.
Update #2. Okay, now that I have cooled off and took some time to thing about my options, I decided to try and laminate a piece of mahogany in the center of the blank from peg head to the heel. I figured that since the neck was ruined anyway, it wouldn't do any damage to try. I ripped two slots through the neck, one on either side of the ruined truss rod slot. I then chiseled out the piece and squared up the end. I ripped a piece of mahogany to snugly fit the slot, glued it up and clamped the entire neck tightly. Tomorrow I will plane both sides flat and then try the truss rod again. I am pretty sure the strength will be fine as other builders make laminated necks all the time. The only difference is that they do the gluing as 3 separate pieces instead of trying to glue a piece in a slot. It should look okay as I am planning on staining them anyways. They only part that might look a little odd is that I am not going to laminate the heel block so the strip will only be in the neck itself. It will also stop at the peg head. Hopefully I will be able to stain it so it doesn't look to out of place. I did order a couple more neck blanks anyway so I have them for future builds. LMI shows them out of stock until tomorrow so I am guessing they will ship sometime this week.
1 comment:
I would think that the repair on the neck will work out okay. Should be as strong as original, if not a little stronger
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