What does that center line mean anyways?.......

Well I got to spend a few hours in the shop after church today doing what I mentioned I wanted to do in my last entry. First thing was to get the inserts in the tenon of the neck. I marked the center line on the tenon, marked exactly where I wanted the inserts, and then proceeded to drill both holes about 1mm to the right of center. I have no idea what on earth I was thinking when I did this but now I have two inserts a hair off center of the tenon. This really isn't a big deal as I can shift the block holes over to compensate but I decided at that point I needed to slow down a little. I guess I was just too anxious to get working on something since I haven't gotten to work on it for the last few days. After I had the inserts all epoxied in, I wanted to get a jig made for drilling the peg holes and a jig for slotting the fingerboard. The peghole jig is a simple thing, just a piece of oak sandwiched between two pieces of MDF. The oak is the exact width of the peghead thickness. I drilled three holes to match the spacing on the drawings. I drilled 1/4" holes in the jig to act as a guide for the bit when drilling the actual peghead. Then I made a jig to hold the fingerboard blank perfectly square to the blade on my tablesaw. The fingerboard is clamped down to the sled, and the whole thing slides over the saw blade. I built it with two runners that fit in the two miter gauge slots in the table of the saw. This will keep the entire jig perfectly square to the blade, thus holding the blank square. I have a blade coming from Stewmac to make the actual cuts.

Finally, I cut the curve in the neck block to get rid of some of the bulk wood. I am modifying the heal just a bit to make it look a little different from the standard neck. It is nothing major and I have seen the same thing done on other guitars so I am not doing anything original, just something you don't see every day.

I have a very busy work week scheduled coming up so I am not sure how much time I will get to spend on the guitar before the weekend. I would like to get the fingerboard built and on the neck so I can carve it, or get started with to bracing. It all depends on the humidity levels this week. My shop is sitting at 53% right now.

Here is the tenon with the two brass inserts set in place. Notice the center line and the actual location of the inserts. Notice the clamps on both sides. After cutting the tenon, I had read several things online that builders like to get the inserts in before cutting the tenon so it won't split. Next time I will do that, but for now I just clamped the sides to keep them from blowing out.

Oh well, not much I can do now but to epoxy them in place.

This is the jig for drilling the tuner holes.

This is my fingerboard slotting sled. If you look at the bottom you can see two pieces of wood that fit snugly in the table slots.

This is the modification the the neck heal I was talking about. Nothing major but something a little different.

The neck rough cut on the band saw for the heal.