Earlier I was sitting around contemplating how building a guitar compares to some of my other projects.  The Shaker dresser was a lot of work.  But in reality, it was a pretty repetitive process.  The drawers were essentially the same set of cuts, with only slightly different sizes.  The side panels and top panel came together quickly.  The aspect that made the project a lot of work was the sheer amount of surface area involved.  Each piece needed to be planed, ripped, cross cut, dove-tailed (the drawers), sanded, stained, and finished.  It seemed like every time I went out to work on it there was another plank that needed to be processed.

Building a boat is probably more like building a guitar.  There are countless steps involved in building a boat.  Getting the hull together comes pretty quickly and you are lulled into a false sense of peace, only to discover later that you have only done the easy part!  There are still framing, decks, hatch covers, knees, breast hooks, spars, gunwales, trim, rudders, tillers, etc. to go.  Each of which are decent projects in their own right.

I’m starting to view building a guitar in the light of building a boat.  An endless series of steps are necessary to get from raw wood to a finished guitar.  And each step is unique.  You learn little when inlaying a fretboard that helps you with gluing that fretboard to the neck.  Carving the body does not help you with soldering the electronics.  But, though there are a lot of unique steps, each step is often only a couple of hours long.  So there is always something new to work on.  Each evening in the shop is a new adventure in exploration.  There are a hundred ways to do most any task.  And there are a hundred and one ways to screw up each task.  It is hard to hide a bad cut or angle when creating the neck, for instance.  That same bad cut on a boat project probably does not lead to throwing away a $50 piece of wood.  You just hide the mistake with some thickened epoxy, a trim strip, or under a cleat.

Don’t worry, I have not destroyed any wood, yet.  I’ve come close, but have always been able to either catch my mistake early, or recover gracefully.  Like in skiing, a wood working project is often an extended series of linked recoveries.  Unless you do any activity consistently over time, you are always riding that thin edge between success and disaster.

So enough philosophizing.  On to the neck.

The earlier post showed the rough headstock shaping.  I could only take that so far before I needed to address the rest of the neck.  The tenon was already cut and sized, so first up was tapering the neck to match the fretboard.  I left it a touch wide so that I could do the final sizing to exactly match the edge of the fretboard after it was glued in place.

With that complete, I moved on to roughing in the profile of the neck.  Lacking a template, I simply sketched the profile on each side of the neck and used the band saw to get the profile close.   Thirty minutes at the bench sander took care of the final profile.  Most of that time was spent working the transition from the headstock to the neck.

I tackled the cross-section rounding with my trusted spoke shave.  This is probably my favorite tool in the shop.  There is something very satisfying pulling the blade along the grain and seeing the little curly shavings spin-off the back side.

Back to the sander to take care of the heel, followed by some detailed sanding to dial in the feel of the neck.  I think this is a very personal thing.  Some folks like a thick, chunky neck.  Some like a neck with more of a V.  I seem to lean towards more of an oval.  It just feels right in my hand.

All of this shaping also allowed me to finalize the transition from the neck to the headstock.  I’d been worrying about this for some time, but in the end, it just sort of took care of itself.

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