Strat Type Neck #3

After letting the glue dry overnight I removed the clamps and set the neck to one side for a few days a Christmas intervened. Once the fingerboard is well and truly mated to the neck, I want to trim off the excess fingerboard material so it is flush with the sides of the neck. I will do this in two stages. Firstly, I will cut as close as I can get to the neck with my band saw without actually going into the neck, and after that i will remove any remaining excess material with a drum sander with a follower base to sand it completely flush.

Neck after unclamping
This is the neck after unclamping showing the excess fingerboard that will need to be removed to make it flush with the neck

Bandsawing away excess
Here I am using my bandsaw to cut away the excess fingerboard material. I want to get as close as I can without actually letting the bandsaw blade coming into contact with the neck material in any way. To add a little extra protection and as a visual aid, i have left the blue masking tape on the neck in place for now.

Neck after bandsawing
This is the neck after the initial stage of removing the excess fretboard material. It is pretty close, so there will not be too much left to remove in the second stage.

Final removal of excess fingerboard
I have set up my pillar drill with a drum sander. This has a collar the same size as the drum that rotates freely at it's base. This cane bee seen more clearly in the second picture. This will follow the neck of the guitar in much the same way as a follower bit in a router does, allowing me to sand right up to the edge of the neck, but no further. I left the masking tape in place for the first pass, but removed it for the later ones

Close up of the sanding drum showing the collar following the outline of the neck. I have the neck seated in a curved neck rest to help keep it level and steady.

Neck after removal of excess fingerboard
This is the neck after removing all the excess fingerboard material from the profile. It looks about right so far.







The next stage is to remove the neck from my original 'Partscaster' guitar so I can get accurate measurements off that to try and replicate them on this guitar. The important things to measure will be the fingerboard radius and the depth and shape of the neck at key points, as well as checking the scale length.

Checking the scale length

After checking the scale length I found that the neck was almost 1cm too long, so I had to trim off some at the heel end. Better than being too short I suppose!

Checking the neck depth
Here I am using a digital vernier caliper to check the depth of the neck. I checked at the second and 12th fret positions. The newer neck is quite a bit chunkier and will require about 3mm taken off at the 1st  fret and a little over 2mm at the 12th. I will get these position about right first then even up in between.

Checking neck shape
Here I am using a tiler's countour guage to determine the shape of the neck. I will transfer the contour to card and use these as a guide when reshaping the neck so as to get as close to the original as possible.

Checking the fingerboard radius
I used a luthier's radius guage to check the fingerboard radius. It turns out to be 10inches which is good as i already have a sanding block of that size.