Potvin Guitars - Handmade Custom Guitars

Once the clamps come off the headplate it looks a little nasty around the nut area. That needs to be cleaned up.

A quick pass over the jointer cleans it right up.

Based on where the nut will sit, I square a line for the end of the fretboard and then trace the fretboard outline. I also make a note of the scale length so I don't get confused with any other builds I'm working on.

I square off the end of the neck tenon. The line represents the minimum tenon length I like to use. On a normal El Camino I would leave this extra bit since it gets covered by the pickguard. On this build I may make a smaller custom pickguard so it covers up as little of the rosewood body as possible. You can also see a line where the truss rod slot will end.

Next I cut the truss rod slot and the truss rod access in the headstock.

Here's a close up of the truss rod access. The slot is cut with a router and then I drill through to meet the truss rod slot.

A quick test of the truss rod and everything looks good. Its time to move on to the fretboard.

Before I do anything to the fretboard, I slice off a piece on either side to use as binding on a future build. If I was smart, I would have done it before I cut the slots :)

Next, while the neck blank is still square, set up a quick fence and drill for dots.

And speaking of dots, I think I'll make some out of rosewood left over from the headplate.

Ready to glue some dots. You can see I kept a little tray of rosewood dust and a the scrap I cut the dots from, in case I need to make more dust. The dust is just in case I need to fill any glitches, but the plug cutter makes a pretty tight fit.

The dots are glued in place with regular old wood glue, making sure the grain runs up and down the fretboard. The plug cutter cuts a tapered plug so the dots look HUGE right now! They'll be smaller when I trim them off flush, but they'll still be a little larger than standard dots. I like to make wooden dots a little bigger so you can actually see some grain.

One last thing I forgot to do on the walnut neck is to route away the tenon area so that it will be flush with the top of the body. With that done, I just need to wait for the dots to dry so I can cut them flush and then radius the fretboard.

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