Acoustic Guitar Construction

Carving a neck with my Christmas LN spokeshave is a dream come true. I worked out my neck profile for the first and 8th fret on paper, drew a tangent line and measured where to put a couple of lines on the neck to take off most of the corner. I then used the spokeshave to make a facet down the neck. If I was the patient type I would have drawn a bunch of more lines for finer facets but after the first even face on both sides I just eyeballed the rest. I used a chisel to finish off the peg board and blend it in.

The neck still needs a bit more work, but first I need to get the inlays in the fret board and glue it on.

Looks great. I enjoy all of your pics. Keep them coming!

Some really good pics. I am working on a neck and this is agreat reference to go to. As well as the rest of the parts. Thankyou.

I put the inlays in the fret board today. Thank goodness for ebony fret boards. I am not sure I am ready for rosewood yet. I am getting better with the router but I need to work on making a nice clean line. I used a pencil this time, the next time I will try a sharp awl scribe and chalk. The other thing I will try next time is to route the inlay rebates before I radius it. The top birds were long enough that the radius did matter.

In any case here are the pictures of what I did

I used a dab of LMI glue to tack the inlays down where I wanted them and trace them with a pencil. I routed the rebates with a pneumatic micro die grinder. I just used the ebony routing dust with CA to fill my mistakes.

Very nice work John! They look perfect.

I finished the construction of the 00 today and am ready to finish sand. The last step was to make my hawk in the harvest moon logo. While I use the same template I have been changing the way I make it. Mostly I have used shell for the moon and the hawk and ebony for the branch. I tried and liked an all shell white MOP for the moon and one black MOP piece for the hawk and the branch. This time I made the hawk and the branch out of ebony. This may be a keeper.

To complete the blog I am showing a series of pictures of how I make the logo. Hard to show in the pictures but this worth noting, to cut the pearl I used 000 heavy metal cutting blades from Germany. The pearl cut like a dream; cutting way easier than the 000 LMI or Stewmac blades I had.

Here is my setup, note the pond aquarium pump, cutting requires that you can see, these pumps are noisy but having a clean line to see make all of the difference. I am sort of blind up close so I use a combination of 2.5 reading class with a visor I got from stewmac.




I had a fret board that I started cutting from slot one instead of the nut, so I set up the band saw and sliced a shell thickness veneer (a bit proud) for the hawk and branch. I glue a template I made in photo shop from a picture and cut away





I do the same with some nice white MOP gluing on the template with CA. Cutting a clean circle is harder than one might imagine. I am getting better but as you are slowly going around you need to pay attention. It is really easy to get off the line.

After cutting the circle I cut out the top and the bottom sections of the moon. Not shown I held the whole thing together bottom side on was paper and flooded with CA.

I mounted it in a 1" drilled out circle with the template paper still on and again flooded with CA. After that I was able to finish sand the head stock until the inlay was level. Of course I was not perfect so I went back and marked the small gaps with a black sharpie and willed them with even more CA.

Dang, you're a talented dude, dude...:-)