Acoustic Guitar Construction

I like carving the neck but I tend to be nervous about the preparation I do to get ready to start carving. I need to take the big router to make the mortise. I switched to the table saw to make the tenon.

I use a 3/8th bit and my router table to route the truss rod channel in the neck.



Before making the tenon I sliced the angle I though the neck shoud have on the bottom of the neck blank to and checked the it was correct. I will use the same angle to cut out the mortise.




This is my new way of making the bolt on tenon using the table saw. I used a miter gauge to set the angle of the cheeks and I have the blade tilted at 5 degrees to make it easier to fit to the body.



I have a new grizzly tenoning jig to cut the tenon out. The jig actually allowed me to turn the neck back to front without changing a setting so for once I got a perfectly centered tenon.



It came out OK.


I have a luthiers tool body clamp and template. Not shown they have a Plexiglas template that allowed me to properly center the body clamp. I use a big router with a template follower and used a half inch down cut bit. The mortise is 3/4" deep.








I used my pillar drill (or drill press) to drill a couple of 5/8 holes for the brass inserts I use. I use to use a hand drill but I got tired of crooked holes. I used hole centers to mark where the bolt holes needed to go on the neck block and then installed the brass inserts. You can see why I need to mark the holes as I was off center on one. :(



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Before going farther I really need to a fret board. The neck will be a bolt on bolt off. Before I drill the pocket for the the neck extension block I wanted the neck centered and at the correct angle.

This is my forth guitar that I used the fret board radius router bits I purchased from http://sje-tools.com/. They really work well and save me from a bunch of planing and sanding. THis router bit gets me 95% there. I just clean the fret board with a radius block.







While I was at it I sawed the fret slots and use a band saw and a plane to taper the fret board



I trimmed the lower portion of the neck to match the fret board with the band saw and a spoke shave. With the neck to body join properly dimension. I went through the normal procedure to correct a bit of side to side tilt and fine tuned the neck angle.

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With the neck properly aligned and bolted on I used my jig to route out the pocket in both the neck block and the neck itself. I did not take a picture but here are a couple from my last guitar.





And this guitar



Currently I have the extension clamped into the neck while the glue cures.

Good stuff ---- thank you for posting

John, very impressive setups for making critical cuts precisely. Interested to learn how the Falcate bracing works on the 12 string, jangly, trebly aspect of its typical sound.

Is the neck pocket a Trevor Gore thing? What's the main benefit?

John J wrote:Is the neck pocket a Trevor Gore thing? What's the main benefit?

Yes it is from the Gore\Gilet Books. The main benefit is that it is a bolt on bolt off neck. Also, the extension is nearly completely supported. It is sort of like the Taylor design.

Wonderful photos and descriptions of this future masterpiece John. Thank you for the building blog.

Thanks Guys,

To finish up the neck extension and fitting. I first drilled a couple pilot holes for the bolts on my drill press (sorry no picture). I used those pilot holes as the guide to drill matching holes in the neck block extension in the guitar.



Then I popped the template off and planed the extension flat to the neck. Also for those in suspense I remembered to drill the truss rod hole. With the pocket opened up almost to the brace, I had no problem drilling the hole in the brace.





I double checked that all alignments were still correct, Because of the falcate braces I have already placed the bridge by drilling the bridge pin holes. So it is very important that the neck is centered and the 12 fret is perfectly placed





Not having plans for a 12 string I drew out a head stock. Note that the sides are offset by 5 mm to provide an asymmetrical line. Gore has this in his head stock design. I've gotten tired of mussing with the head stock transition to make them perfectly symmetrical, this is a great solution..



I glued on some wings so that the head stock was wide enough.



Instead of making a template, I decided to use the head stock veneer as the template. This is a long head stock, luckily a few years back I bought somebodies stash of orphaned figured Koa sides.





The paper is double taped down


Here is the back



Make sure it all works



I used my safe-t planer to get the head stock closer to final. Also it will be parallel to the top os my pilot holes are straight. I plan to use a couple of them to index the head stock veneer.











Once the glue was cured, I cut the head stock out to the tape down copy on the band saw.



Enough for tonight!