FrankenLab Experiment #6

[FrankenWashie]

I'm excited about this.

You’re excited? You should see Igor, he’s so wound up all three hands are shaking!

[FrankenWashie]

So the full blank was thick enough to do two bolt on neck blanks, so that’s what the lab set about doing this afternoon.

We started with this:


Turned it into this with some careful use of a cordless skilsaw:



Always, always take multiple shallow cuts in one side to get to an appropriate depth and then matchup with the same pattern from the other side. Don’t do what I’ve done here, as Blades deflect and follow grain and do all sorts of wonderful things on a single deep cut.

Thankfully the lab has a spiral head thickness planer, which allowed me to get these blanks cleaned up.

As I’d already satisfactorily jointed them by hand, all I had to do was pass them through to clean up.

That left me with these:



They are just on 27mm thick so still plenty to play with. Width wise, they are good for a standard F or G style neck. Material will need to be added for headstock width, but that’s expected.

The lower half of the blank , where the blue veneer didn’t quite make it all the way:


And the full coverage blank:



Given the need to finish off a couple of things (red strat, Reso, IB-5) this will likely be shelved a while. I may get around to doing the scarf joint for the defect blank this weekend but that’s not something I want to rush, for obvious reasons.



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[Simon Barden]

Well done, sir.

[RocknRolf]

That looks amazing! great work :-)

[Sonic Mountain]

Gorgeous work man.

[JohnH]

Great work, as ever

[colin2121]

You are a true craftsman FW!

[Andy40]

awsomeness

[FrankenWashie]

Okay, so I was going to leave this a while, but I had some time today so I decided to set up and cut for my scarf joint.



I had set the side where the veneer hadn’t reached as being the fretboard side, but I realised that the bulk of that would be pared away in the neck carve. So I elected to make that the underside of the blank, I think there will still be a couple of spots where I might need to fill, but this is a test neck so meh.



I forgot to snap the marking up, but the essential arithmetic is this:
My desired head length is 6 & 3/4”, so I added 1.5” for safety.
The scarf angle is 13.5 degrees, measured from the end of that adjusted head measurement.

In order to insure the cut stayed square and straight i clamped a guide to the blank. This set the angle for the saw and insured it didn’t stray from the 90 Degrees.



So once the nervous cut was made I ended up with a reasonable cut. Doing this with a hand saw is tricky, you are likely to end up with some form of wander on the cut, which you can see at the bottom of the photo. I used my disc sander to take out the bulk of the saw marks and then tidied up with a Kanna plane.

Then it is a matter of checking the squareness of the two bevels, one will form a part of the fretboard bed, the other needs to mate up squarely against the rear of the headstock slice.



Once everything is squared off, minor differences in surface flatness or irregularity can be sorted out with pencil marks and 80 grit paper on a flat surface. You work gradually to even out everything.


The head segment needs to be cut down, I’ve gone with a 5/8” thickness, again this had to be cut down by hand and dressed to clean up the saw marks.

Next step will be setting up to actually make the joint.



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[Simon Barden]

Nice cutting.