I’m making progress on bunch of fronts at the same time.  While I finish up the body details like the electronics cavity covers, binding, and detail sanding, I’ve started in on the neck.  I’m doing a one-piece neck from a nice piece of mahogany.  I started out by making sure that all sides were flat and square, then rough-sketched the layout on the neck blank.  Some of these steps can be done in various orders.  I started by cutting the channel for the truss rod.  I’m using a two-way truss rod from LMII (www.lmii.com).  This is fit snugly in a channel just deeper than the truss rod.  Later on it will be capped with a thin strip of maple.

[Show slideshow]

Next I started in on the neck tenon.  This needs to be a snug fit in the neck mortise on the body of the guitar.  It also needs to be perfectly straight so the neck does not stick out at some funny angle from the guitar body.  The angle where the neck meets the body must also match the angle of the neck plane that was cut on the body.  I made a wedge of wood to match this angle when I still had the hinge jig for the body set up.  Here’s a great thread on how to go about cutting and fitting the neck tenon.

I used the cross cut sled on my table saw to rough cut the depth of the shoulder cuts, leaving about 1/8″ on either side of the tenon for detail sizing using my router.  Once again I used my handy routing jig to size the tenon.  Set the neck on one side, remove a very thin veneer off that side, flip it over and do the same on the other side.  This creates a perfectly straight and centered tenon.  Creep up very slowly on the tenon width, keeping in mind that each cut is doubled in depth since it is done on each side of the tenon.  Once I was close, I used sandpaper for fine tuning the fit.

Next, is to set the depth of the tenon by cutting out the back side.  Because the mortise is set at the neck plane angle, the back of the tenon can be parallel to the top face.

Pretty close.  Just a bit of final fitting once the neck is carved and it will be ready.

[Show slideshow]