It’s been a while, but it’s finally time to get back at it – the neck had been coming along, and last time I posted I was pondering dots and binding. Well, since then, lots of non-guitar projects have taken precedence (I now have working gutters!!!), but I was also waiting on parts from a guitar shop in the USA. My original shipment was lost and they sent out replacements, so here we finally go!
Next step is to actually DO something with dots and/or binding…in an attempt to get my homemade neck to be something like a Fender neck, or hopefully better?
So first off, the dots. I mark out where they are supposed to go, keeping everything nicely centered. I must have quadruple checked this, expecting to end up spacing them incorrectly…
Everything looked good, so I punched out the centers to help align the drill bit later on.
After earlier experiments with coloured epoxy and other odd inlays, I settled on simple wooden dots. The wood happens to be some fancy-schmancy figured maple from another guitar project (the Telecaster replacement…prolly talk about that later in the blog…)
So, I drill out 1/4″ plugs on the drill press:
The hole plug bit is swapped out for a 1/4″ Forstner, and in we go… No looking back now!
Happily, the quadruple-checking appears to have worked; all the holes are in the right locations!
The plugs should fight tight, but do need to be held in place, They go in with liberal amounts of CA glue (that’s what bonafide woodworkers call superglue).
While progress is great, it’s not a great time in the build, as the results look like crap when you look close…
The CA glue is all over the place, the dots aren’t flush. If I hadn’t seen other blogs and YouTube reports of this step I’d prolly throw it all away right now…
As I said, this wasn’t unexpected, and a quick clean-up with a chisel promises better results later on…
OK, as I waited long enough for the binding materials to show up from the States, I decided to not only do bind the body, but do the neck as well. This requires cutting a rectangular channel for the binding to fit into along the edge of the neck (and body, eventually). A special router bit is used for this; it rides along the edge of the neck (or body) with the bearing seen at the top, and the cutter head is offset by the width of the binding. The depth of the router is set to how deep you want your binding to be (1/4″ in my case)
Even I test things once in a while, and I did so this time. Not going to ruin the neck at this point if I can help it… Routing out a channel on a piece of scrap wood shows all is set up correctly:
I nerve-rackingly route out the channel around the neck, and the test fit, well, fits perfect. Woot!
Check out the ~1mm channel of the fret-board’s rosewood I left under the binding as a decorative feature. Kinda nice, eh? I originally figured I was going to paint the neck the same colour as the body, but after this I think maybe not.
The binding has to wrap around the bottom of the neck (closest to the guitar body). That requires tight corners, so I test out heating the binding to the point of melting it to get a good fit there…
Sidebar: there are a few different ways to actually attach the binding to the neck (or body)…special glues, superglue (I mean, “CA glue”), hide glue…
I happen to prefer acetone. Why? Well, I used it once on my first Telecaster body, and it worked, so there you go. The binding is basically ABS plastic, and acetone dissolves that stuff. So you can hold the binding against the wood, drizzle a bit of acetone in there and by capillary action (yay science! Eat, that, Trump!), the acetone will dissolve a bit of the binding, which ends up sealing the ABS to the wood fibers.
I couldn’t get confirmation online as to whether this works with the rosewood that my fretboard is made of though. Rosewood is notoriously oily, so mebbe there would be issues. Hence a little test to see how she works, She works fine!
So the newly-bend binding gets taped in place, ready for the acetone:
How does one drip acetone into binding channels? Well, I use syringes!
“Why?” I hear you saying… “why, Kevin, would you have syringes?”
Fear not, I don’t have the diabetes (or the covides!). Many years ago, when it was fresh news, my Hallowe’en costume was a drugged up Lance Armstrong. I have ten or twenty of these that were hanging off my Tour de France jersey.
Many times in woodworking things are one step forward and two steps back. This appeared to be such a time, as the acetone ended up leeching oils out of the rosewood. It looked like the neck was bleeding. Scary!
I was kinda expecting this though, and after a preliminary scraping of the binding and a quick sanding things looked a lot better.
There’s a lot of sanding coming up on this as well though. Recall that I still need to radius the fretboard, and after that the back of the neck will see a ton of grinding and sanding to round the back into a real guitar neck shape.
So, all of the excess CA glue and rosewood blood all over the maple neck will disappear.
Not bad for one day of work (especially considering I also got a gutter downspout relocated!)
You must be logged in to post a comment.