More on the head stock…

The head stock (the part up on the top of the guitar with the tuning thingies) now needs a little lovin’; it’s a little jealous of the fancy work just done to the neck 🙂

So, I dig through the old woodpile and find a hunk of wood my Dad gave me that who-knows-where HE got it from…

This chunk is one of two big slabs that I have had sitting around for probably twenty years. I recall Dad making me a solid wood skateboard back when we lived in Prince George, which would be ~1973-ish, and I think it was from a sister chunk of wood to this one. If so, it’s coming up on 50 years old at the very least. Kinda cool that there’s a bit of Dad in the build!

As to what the wood actually is, I can’t say for sure. I seem to recall him thinking it was mahogony or ebony, but when I saw into it it definitely smells like the rosewood that the neck is made from, even if it is somewhat lighter.

Whatever, I’m going to use it, which means I’m going to have to learn how to resaw wood! This isn’t as simple as just sawing wood then sawing it again; it refers to slicing thin sheets (veneers) from a solid piece of stock. I start by cutting a piece off the block of wood that will be long enough to make veneers that will fit the head stock.

The original block is huge – way wider than I need, so after cutting off a piece to length, I split the resulting piece down the middle. It’s rough wood and needs to be made nice and square, so I double-side-tape the pieces together and to a 2×4, flip it over and run it over my jointer to get a smooth face on each. I flip the two pieces over and repeat the process so each face is nice and flat. They aren’t necessarily parallel to each other but that won’t matter for what’s coming next.

I set up the band saw with an auxiliary fence, around 1/4″ from the blade, and run the block through to get a 1/4″ veneer. One side is nice and smooth (from the jointer); the other has rough lines from the band sawing. I turn the original block around so the other smooth side is against the fence and repeat. I now have two veneers and a thinner block with rough sides. I re-joint the thinner block to get smooth faces and hit the band saw again. When done, I finish with five veneer blanks.

Next, to thin the blanks down to ~1/8″, we turn to the planer. This works swimmingly as I remove, bit by bit, layers from the rough side of each blank. What I forgot, though, is that you really should only plane wood down to a thickness of around 1/8 to 1/4″ before it gets too thin and the planer blades just eat the piece up. Which, of course, happened.

To get this thin, you are supposed to affix the thin veneers to a thicker backing piece (i.e. with our favourite, yes, double-sided carpet tape). Ah well, the remaining four pieces were thin enough for my purposes. And all over the floor was evidence that woodworking is mainly an exercise in taking big chunks of rough wood and turning them into sawdust.

It turns out the four remaining blanks were about three more than I needed – I picked the nicest one and band sawed it roughly to the head stock shape.