Neck Shaping, Sanding, Fretting.

Things are taking shape. Above you can see the gluing on of a fingerboard. The guitar is loaded with clamps to get a lot of pressure. 

After the glue is dried, I leave it like that over night, it is time to do the necks. And this really is one of my personal favorite jobs so I was looking forward to that. 

 First I take off the excess wood. This normally isn't much of an effort and takes two minutes if you're using spanish cedar or mahogany for the neck. But not if you use padouk. Which I did for one of my guitars. Too easily there is large tear out because of the complex grain structure.

So I slightly worked my way forward instead of jamming big chunks off, always taking care of grain directions. Once I was done with that I trimed the neck close to it's final thickness which is about 21mm at the first fret to 23mm at the 10th fret. Next was the fun part. The actual shaping of the neck, the heel and the transition from the neck to the headstock. As you can see on the fotos I left the neck thicker where the straight part transitions into the headstock to do a faked german neckjoint. Appart its nice appearance it has a very practical reason to it. You can rest your hand in a "locked in position" when playing cords. 

After the necks were finished I did the fretting....done the first guitar....no problem...

 

While preparing for the second I realised that I didn't have enough pre bend fret wire. I had some straight pieces. But I don't have a fret bender....ever tried to get straight frets into a curved fingerboard?!? It's not working.

It gave me a serious headache. Time was running against me and I had to come up with a solution to get the frets into the fingerboard that day.
But things can be so simple. I made a fret bender. Took about 15 minutes. Some rounded what-ever-pieces-of-junk I had liing around fixed to some plywood leftover. You can't even set it, I just drilled holes for the wheels...But it has done the job. Not too bad.

 

The last step after the fret job is done is to sand everything up till 320 grid and they are ready to be laquered.