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To make the neck blank, three pieces of walnut are glued together. Sometimes I glue all three at the same time, and other times like this I do it in two stages. Each piece is flat sawn, but when the whole thing is turned on edge the neck becomes three qaurter sawn pieces which is very strong. I'll be able to get two necks out of this glue-up.
After removing the clamps, I true up the two surfaces that will eventually receive fretboards by running them over the jointer.
Before I head to the bandsaw and cut out the necks, the headstock angle needs to be cut precisely. A table saw with a jig to hold the blank at the correct angle is used for this operation.
After some time on the bandsaw you can see how to get two necks out of one blank. The two wedges and the piece in the middle are left over for things like headstock ears, control knobs etc.
The bandsaw leaves the neck tenons in a pretty rough state. They need to be perfectly flat and square. The fretboard side of each neck is run up against the fence on the table saw, and then the ends are squared up with a mitre saw.
The widest part of a neck is the headstock. Making the blank wide enough to accommodate the full headstock width would waste a lot of wood, so after cleaning up the tenons, I cut two pairs of 'ears' that will be glued on each side of the headstock part of the blank.
The flamed maple fretboard is for this build. I milled the others while I had all the tools set up. The two on the left are Indian Rosewood; the one on the far left is a really nice chocolaty colour. You never know what you'll find as you start cleaning up rough wood!
Here they are all slotted for their various scale lengths.
This build is getting a matching rosewood head plate. You can't see it very well in this picture, but the rosewood has really beautiful swirls and colours. The white mother of pearl inlay will really pop on these. The other head plates (ebony and korina) are for other builds I'm working on.
Before the head plate is glued on, the end needs to be trimmed to match the neck angle. I do this with a jig on the table saw. You can see the colour and grain patterns of the rosewood a little better in this picture.
Here's the head plate glued in place on the black walnut neck. Notice the 2 finishing nails that keep it from sliding around while I put the clamps on.
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