FrankenLab Experiment #6

[FrankenWashie]

The Bride’s Father has long been involved in the wood and wood products industry.
He is currently clearing out and consolidating his various stashes of wood accumulated over the years and this has had some side benefit for the Lab.
So we have inherited a stack of nice clean DAR NZ beech boards, roughly 20mm thick x 75mm wide and of varying lengths.

So the plan is to use some of this to make a multi laminate neck, with two different colour veneers between three slices of the Beech.

So we have gotten this far:


So far , the Beech works very easily. I have noticed there is some fragility to it around areas of figured grain and it Chips out very easily. This may prove problematic for the neck shaping, but I feel it can be worked around.
Given it is a softer wood I may also have to carbon rod this puppy as well, but we shall see.


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[Sonic Mountain]

Ooohhhh nice!

[Woltz]

Man that looks great. I might do that sort of laminate on my 12 string build.

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[Hardcoretroubadour]

Oooh! More goodness from the lab, I'll get the popcorn....

[JohnH]

Gosh, that looks fantastic

[TZK321]

So the plan is to use some of this to make a multi laminate neck ....

I'm sure it'll look great. Have you considered using it on the body of the guitar as well?

[Simon Barden]

Life's a beech and then you dye it.

[FrankenWashie]

I'm sure it'll look great. Have you considered using it on the body of the guitar as well?

sadly I’ve only the thin boards, and not enough to laminate a full body from. There are three strips that would be long enough for a neck through G or F scale, which may get a run later. That will require some long laminates, so I think veneers are out for that.

[FrankenWashie]

A teeny tiny bit of progress tonight. Managed to get the whole blank square.




It’s a very small win, but doing it by hand has always proved problematic for me before.
Some careful attention and frequent checking allowed me to get things all squared out and ready to mark up for blanks.

One of the tow blanks out of this is going to be a bit dodgy. I unfortunately did not have enough blue veneer to get full width through the blank. You can see the effect below:


So that leaves a little void to one side, but I feel it may be salvageable as the fretboard side of a secondary blank, with some epoxy treatment to fill and stabilise it.


So I had to wet it down to see what the beech looks like:



The intention is for a scarf joint, 3 x 3 HS, 25.5”. The slightly dodgy blank, if it holds together, will be the basis for a multi scale neck (Blame Igor. And probably B’lark just a little bit as well).


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[Andy40]

I'm excited about this.