Frets and first neck set....

Today I spent time with the fingerboards getting them ready for gluing to the necks. First I sanded them down and polished them with micromesh. It is a lot easier doing this without the frets installed so I did it first. Once that was done, I cut the frets and installed them. Nothing exciting, just a bunch of hammering! I was going to glue the fingerboards to the necks, but before I did I decided to work on the neck sets. I am glad I waited. I noticed that both bodies have a slight bulge directly under the fingerboard extension locations. My guess is that the A frame bracing is causing the slight bulges. So instead of gluing the fingerboards down, I decided to get the neck sets close to finished so I can use the flat tops of the necks as a guide to sand down the top so the fingerboards can sit flat on the top. If I had glued the fingerboards on, it would be a lot harder to do this.

I decided to start with the most difficult neck first so I could get it over with. This is the one I mentioned last time where the neck block ended up slightly tilted. It took a lot of time but I finally got the neck straight, with a good back angle and a fairly nice joint. The joint will need to be cleaned up as I have a few small gaps in it, but it is good enough for now so I can get top sanded. One thing I have learned about these Sapele necks, the wood is hard, splintery, and the neck joint is very hard to sand. The typical 'flossing' method takes a very long time to remove the smallest amount of wood. I guess this is a good thing, but it took a long time for me to get this neck set. Hopefully the next one will go easier. I have two more Sapele neck blanks on my shelf that I will probably use, but they will probably be the last ones I get for a while.

This is the first guitar with the neck temporarily set. It took a lot of work to get this one lined up and at the correct angle because of the neck block error, and the difficulty of this wood to work with.

The right side of the neck joint. You can see a small gap right at the top. there is also a gap at the tail, but that is getting cut off for the heel cap so I am not worried about it.

The other side of the neck joint. There is a small gap at the tail end here as well.

The fingerboards all shiny with frets installed to the 14th fret.

Here is a closeup of the fingerboard end at the sound hole. I know, a lot of guys like to build the fingerboard so it lines up right along the edge of the sound hole. I personally don't care for that look. I decided to line it up just under the bottom perfling strip so there is still a line of spruce between the dark fingerboard, and the darkness of the sound hole. I did both of the guitars this way.