Now that the fretboard has been radiused, it’s back to the back of the neck – two scary things left to do… (a) carve the back of the neck and (b) install, level and polish the frets. First off is the carving.
I have rough drawings of the original Danelectro neck profiles, but don’t want to copy them exactly. You might recall me mentioning earlier that the Dano’s originally did not have truss rods – as such their necks were a little beefier (i.e. thicker) than modern shred machines. I want to pay a bit of homage to the vintage design, but also don’t want the neck to be a baseball bat.
So I take a profiling gauge and check out my Tele, strat and Godin necks at the 1st and 12th frets and do a kinda what feels right compromise.
These swag guesses are stuck to some pressboard (yes, leftovers from the body’s front and back panels!) and cut out as measuring templates.
That done, there’s nothing left but to attack all this work with a rasp and spoke shave. A first time for everything…
I suppose the heavy-handedness of this stage of building the guitar does match my playing ability…
Well, it gets closer. The immediate aim is to get the neck thickness (front to back) just a tad over the final dimensions at the 1st and 12th frets; shape the neck roughly, then get the profiles right at each end, after which it’s just shaving the neck in between so everything is straight…
At each end, the transition from the neck profile to the rest of the neck parts has to be…nice…so no-go zones are marked out for later finessing.
Before I got this close I traded the rasp for a cabinet scraper for finer control.. Getting there!
Next day, I drill out the side dot locations. These are in the same places as the ones on the fret board, but can be seen when looking down at the neck.
Typical dots are 1/16-1/8″ in diameter, but with my aging eyesight I opted for something a little bigger…
The sanding dust from when I sanded down the fret board comes in handy; this gets packed into the holes, then I drip CA (bonafide super) glue on after, creating matching side dots.
Final shaping with 100, 220 and 320 grit sandpaper, and we are done and done. Next teeth-grinding episode: frets!
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