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To get things rolling I made up some drawings. I wanted to play with a shorter scale to make the end result friendlier for slide playing, so I drew a 24" scale neck. Having a printer that is large enough to print full sized bodies is sweet. I was pleasantly surprised that the neck fit on one page because a 24.75" or 25.5" does not; I have to rotate it on a diagonal to get it to fit.
After some cutting and taping (my daughter would be proud), here is my template. I won't bother to make actual templates out of MDF since this is a one-off (for now anyway).
As you can see, the headstock doesn't quite fit on the 3/4" maple blank I have, so I'll need to do a little modification when I shape the headstock.
Since I'm building a slide specific guitar, I want the neck to be a little wider at the nut. I'm going to use my Tele neck template to achieve this. I'll just line up the bottoms of the two templates, that way the nut will be the same width as the Tele neck is around the 1st to 2nd-ish fret.
A quick trip to the band saw and the rough shape is cut.
This is a peek inside the jig I built to make it easier to cut truss rod slots.
The blank is held in place with two toggle clamps.
The long slot is the exact length of the truss rod less the adjustment head. The short slot will be used later to cut the truss rod access hole.
I cut the slot in 3 passes and then compare the depth to the truss rod. The fit is perfect.
I attach the Telecaster neck template with double sided tape and clean up both sides using the router. I stop just short of the headstock. I'll clean that up later on the spindle sander.
I use a piece of scrap with a straight edge to clean up part of the headstock.
A little time on the spindle sander and the headstock is done.
I decided to go with a Morado (Pau Ferro) fret board.
You might recall that on the drawing of the neck I actually printed 3 necks and 2 headstocks. You never know when you'll need an extra, like now. I cut out another neck template, but I cut this one down the center line and tape it to the edge of the fret board. I'll be using this one as a guide to cut the fret slots.
I built this sled for my table saw and a StewMac fret slotting blade. Normally I would also use one of the StewMac slotting scales, but they don't make one in 24" so I'll be eye-balling this one using my paper template. If you look carefully at the jig, you'll see where I jotted a note to myself about what blade height to use for my favourite fret wire.
If you look at the fence on the jig, you'll see a little metal pin sticking out. It would normally fit into the notches on the StewMac fret scale. In this case, I'll be aligning it by eye with the fret locations from my template. I've done a lot of tests with my printer to make sure that an inch in the CAD drawing is actually printed as exactly one inch. I may be eye-balling it, but its pretty accurate eye-balling!
A couple of minutes later we have a slotted board.
Stay tuned for more...
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