I started by routing out the channel for the truss rod. One nice thing about the center strips is that it makes lining up the truss rod route a lot easier. None of the tedious centerline measuring. After the mess that happened with the green twins neck, I was very careful to make sure that the bit was very tight! That didn't help much though. About half way through the cut the bit broke. Fortunately no harm was done (other than to the bit of course!) and I had a spare. I replaced the bit and finished the cut. Once that was done I marked out the tenon for cutting but before cutting it out, I drilled and installed the brass inserts for the bolts with epoxy. Once they were dry I trimmed the end dead flat and cut the tenon using my tenoning jig on my table saw. It was pretty uneventful. I also cut the curve for the heel block. Lastly I took the Koa bindings off of the bender to make sure they were okay. They all bent fine with not cracks or splits.
Today I made a small change to my plans. I originally was going to use a East Indian rosewood peg head veneer but at the last minute I changed my mind and decided to use Ziricote since that is what I used for the rosette. The fingerboard and bridge will still be rosewood. I glued the Zirocote veneer on and got it all clamped up. I then turned my sites on cutting the fingerboard fret slots. I have a jig I made for this but I had some problems with my clamp screws tearing out since the jig is made of MDF. I took a 5/8" oak dowel and cut 8 plugs 1/2" long, drilled out the base and glued the dowels in with thin CA. I sanded them flat and that gave me a nice hardwood spot to screw the clamps to. I printed out a fret scale based on 24.9" scale using Wfret. That scale was then used as a guide for cutting the slots. Once the slots were cut I had to call it quits for the day. Next up will be more neck work and possibly some binding work.
Okay, for some reason my pictures ended up out of order. I will need to figure out how that happened. Oh well. Here is the neck after routing the truss rod channel.
This is my slot cutting jig again. If you look closely, you can see where I glued in the oak dowels for the clamps. It is much more solid now. Yeah, I know the slots are already cut. You weren't supposed to notice that!
Here is the peghead veneer being glued and clamped in place. You just can't have too many clamps!
The neck end with the inserts epoxied in. You can also see the tenon layout lines.
Here are the bindings out of the bender. I bent 5 just in case one broke on me. Oh well, now I have a spare!
The neck with the truss rod in the channel. Nothing exciting.
The fingerboard after the slots being cut.
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