Next up is the fretboard – that top part you put your fingers on…
OK, I said I was building a guitar from scratch, but maybe not completely from scratch. I sourced this rosewood fretboard from eBay. It has the fret slots pre-cut to the Dano’s 25.5” scale length. Was pretty much the same price as an un-cut piece of rosewood.
This will be glued to the top of the neck, of course.
The Dano uses an angled headstock, which you can make either by starting with a really thick neck blank and cutting away (i.e. wasting) a bunch of wood, or to use a scarf joint. Scarf joints do have an unsightly (gasp!) joint line on the bottom of the neck (the top joint is covered by the fretboard), but they do use less wood, and they are actually stronger than solid wood, due the the way the grain follows the shape of the bend…
I decided on a 10 degree break angle, which is a little more than the original Dano’s 6 degree, but way less than, say, Gibson’s 14-17 degree specs.
A quick jig is basically a board screwed vertical to my table saw sliding sled at 10 degrees; the neck is held in place and cut. I pre-planed my headstock material down to 1/2″ thick and cut it using the same jig.
That got the scarf cuts close, but not perfect. So another jig is built as shown here; there is also a little sled that rides along the parallel rails there (which are at 10 degrees). Sandpaper is glued to the bottom of the sled and I simply sand the face of the joints down so they are exactly square to the neck.
Next up is the truss rod. This (the thing that looks kinda like a violin bow) will flex in a curve one way or the other when adjusted via a screw at one end. It’s placed in the guitar neck under the fretboard. When the guitar is done and the strings are installed, they pull a lot on the neck, which causes the neck to bend slightly away from the guitar. This is undesirable when excessive, as it lifts the strings away from the fretboard, making the guitar harder to play and keep in tune. The truss rod allows you to pull the neck back against the string tension.
OK OK, I didn’t build the truss rod from scratch either, jeez…
Anyhoo, it is 1/4 inch wide, so a few careful passes across a 1/4″ router bit and the channel is made for the rod. Just have to square up the end of the cut to match the end of the truss rod.
I do decide to wrap the thing in teflon tape prior to installation to guard against any possible vibration. Once the fretboard is glued on there’s no turning back…
I want to keep glue out of the truss rod channel, so I protect those areas of the fretboard with tape before glue-up. I add a couple indexing pins – basically little ends from staples – to hold the pieces in alignment once the glue is added, then glue up the pieces, temporarily press them together to squeeze out excess glue, pull them apart, remove the masking tape and put them back together again.
Of course, ‘beginning to resemble’ is just a start. While the glued up neck thus far is the same width all the way down, the final neck will taper from the body down to the headstock. This taper is cut out as a routing template, and cut out cleanlyon the table saw.
I line up the template to the neck and affix it with my trusty double-sided carpet tape, take it to the band saw and…we cut! That’s the template on the top. I band saw away as close to the edge as I can get to make it easier on the router later.
I think I’ll wait on getting more clamps though – this saw blade is just burning its way through the wood…
Band sawing done, it’s off to the router table. A flush-trim bit follows the template around the neck to match the template taper, then another pass around the heel area with a round-over bit makes that end nice and clean.
That’s it for today. Looks much like it did at the beginning of the day, but it is now shaped to an actual neck width, so it feels almost like a guitar neck now!
The burned cut at the headstock doesn’t matter as it still needs to be cut to final shape later. What’s next?
-fret markers (those dots that somehow let your fingers know where they are on the fretboard)
-shaping the headstock
-I haven’t decided if I’ll bind the neck and/or headstock yet, although I’m leaning in that direction
-shaping the back of the neck itself (the scary part!)
-radiusing the fretboard
-installing the frets (more scaryness)
That’s all, then I can get back to the fun-ness that is the body.
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