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The first step in creating a laminated neck blank is to cut and glue up the various pieces. This is a 5 piece neck made up of 3 pieces of flamed maple and 2 pinstripes of walnut. The multiple pieces not only make the neck look nice, they add significant strength to the neck. They'll also match up nicely with the walnut body. Simple things like this make custom guitar building interesting :)
Fast forward a bit; here's the glued up walnut body and the heavily quilted maple top both cut to shape. Both are two pieces, and the top has some of the nicest symmetrical quilt I have ever seen. The degree of symmetry can vary in book matched sets. Carving the top can also affect the symmetry, so cross your fingers.
You can also see that I've: cleaned up the neck blank and cut the headstock scarf, cut a nice slice of African blackwood to use as a fretboard, and managed to cut a headplate from the leftovers of the book matched top.
My shop camera was acting up, so I apologize for the leaps forward in time. Here the body has been hollowed and the top is glued on and trimmed to size. I also ran it through the thickness sander to remove the glue lines. Quilted maple burns quite easily as you can see in the picture. I was a little more aggressive with the thickness sander since the burn marks will get carved away. I've also glued the headstock scarf, carefully matching the walnut pinstripes. The headstock was thinned, cut to shape and the tuner holes are drilled. This one is moving along nicely.
The beautiful African blackwood fretboard has a 12" radius applied, fret slots cut and white mother of pearl dots on the face and side.
I didn't get a picture of the hollowed out body, but here's the template to give you an idea of how much wood was removed before the quilted maple top was glued on. I took a while to work out a design that removes weight without upsetting the balance of the guitar. I also left enough material to allow a nice belly carve on the back. If you look at the template carefully you'll see where I've made a note to myself not to use the jack portion of the template because I've altered the size slightly. I have a separate template for it now, and one of these days I'll get around to updating this one :)
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