Now For The Fun Part: Carving The Neck Contours

After roughing out the contour with my Scheltema Neck Jig, I use a couple of Iwasaki files to finalize the contour of each neck. It's physically demanding work, but I get better results this way.

It takes 30-45 minutes to get to this point with each neck. 

Not Another Jig!!!!

Yep, I have built yet another jig for building my guitars. Actually, it's another Scheltema Neck Contour jig. This is my third attempt at building one of these nifty jigs. The first two worked, but they were a bit sloppy. I took everything I had learned while building the first two and incorporated  this knowledge into what I am confidant will be the final jig. My initial test (I used a slab of Pine for the neck blank) was exactly what I had hoped for. Check it out:

I call it the Scheltema Neck Contour Jig v3.0.

The resulting contour is so smooth, I will only need to sand from 150 grit to 220 to finish.

Making A Guitar Neck

Today I made the neck for the guitar I posted about on Saturday. Once again, I am using the Scheltema jig to form the back contour. This time around, I decided to make the truss rod slot deeper than I usually do. The deeper slot allowed me to plane down the surface where the fretboard will be glued on. After a couple of passes through my jointer, the slot is now at the correct depth. The reason I did this was to thin the neck. Instead of a fat "C" shape, I now have a thin "C" shape. Check out the photos so far: