Woodworking

After last week's rounding of the neck and fingerboard radiusing, this edition of the guitar build will focus on installing the frets into the neck, along with a little finish work.   The necks at this stage are shaped and sanded, but not finish sanded yet. 

I'm getting a little ahead, truth is there is one little area of shaping left to do.  When the fingerboard is radiused, the transition between the headstock is affected and looks a little off to me.

 The ongoing saga of the scratch built guitars continues...  In the last chapter installed the caps that cover the truss rods.  In this chapter, I'll cut the slots for the fretwire, and make/install the fingerboard dots

 Had I only been doing a single neck, I might have just went ahead and marked the fingerboard out for the fret slots and cut them.  But since I am doing three, some sort of template seemed in order.

 I did buy Stew-Mac's fret slotting miter box for the job, but I didn't want to spring the $40 dollars for their fret scale template.  I was past the point of available cash, so - I decided I would make my own.  The miter box has a small indexing pin in it these templates use, so I figured to use it as well, by cutting slots for it in a bar of aluminum.

The neck is shaped, but I didn't get to thinning the headstock - I guess I should have included it in the last entry - but it was getting a bit long, I thought.  Well, this one is longer, and now I have to put it here, just before the truss rods.  I need to, as I will need to drill into it there...

To thin down the headstock, first it's a trip through the bandsaw to remove the majority of the waste:

Once each was thinned, I made a quick and dirty thicknessing jig for the router:

 Now that I have the outer limit routed, and while the glue on the maple cap on the tele is drying, I turn to routing out the cavities on the strat using a the top bearing pattern router bit set from StewMac,  It's hard to find a better set than these, though I'm sure they exist - most have a longer cutting length, which can actually be a bit long in starting a cut  - and the smaller bit is handy for getting in those narrow channels and is even harder to find elsewhere.  I do have one, a 1/2" Freud bit with a 1" cutting length that was handy to have when the cavities started getting deep.