OK, here's what I have done the last couple days. Mainly just neck stuff on Thursday, and a little more on Friday. Friday, I also worked on carving the top of the chambered Les Paul body. Here are some shots of the necks so far. The first picture is of the two Telecaster style necks (with my new and improved headstock). If you click on the picture, you can see where the crosses will be inlaid. I need to cut the heads so that it is thinner and then I can cut the slots for the frets. The Les Paul neck will have a rosewood fretboard and will have an ebony veneer on the headstock.
Here, is the Les Paul neck in the neck pocket of the body. It is not a perfect fit (I need to get some of the edges worked out to fit more
snugly against the body), but it is much better than my attempt without the templates. On the first picture, you can see the neck angle is wrong. This is because the neck pocket angle had not been routed out yet. The third picture shows the template sitting on top of the neck, which shows
kind of what it will look like with the fretboard on.
Here are some pictures of the body once the neck angle had been routed and the edge routed with my new bit to make carving the top a bit easier. You can
definitely see the difference from how it looked when the top was flat. As you can see, the top is now carved down to match the
koa binding. I still need to do a lot of sanding to get the glue off and everything smoothed out.
Well, here is my one boo boo. In the first picture, you can see that the router bit took too much out near the neck tenon. The second (blurry) picture, shows the piece that I glued in to fix the problem. The fretboard will be covering this area, so it should not make too much difference.
Here is the guitar after a lot of sanding and sprayed with water. It looks real nice. There is quite a bit of figure that comes out when sprayed that you don't see when it is dry. The
finish should actually make it look even better, especially once it is polished and buffed out.
Well, its starting to look like a guitar now. I will have pictures of the others with their necks in the body once I get back to the shop. I wish that I could spend more time working, but lately, all I get is a few hours a day for a couple days every other week due to work and other family/household
responsibilities, so if you happen to have a lot of money that you want to give me so I don't have to work anymore and can just go to the shop during the "normal" work week, my family and I would be forever
grateful. Wow, that was a long
sentence. That's all I have for the time being. Let me know what you think. Thanks for looking,
Aaron
