DIY Projects | Making a Neck (Esp/Eng)

Hi there,

We are back with Woodworking Wednesdays. Today, we'll take a look at the process of this project. This time we are working on the neck of the instrument.

Recap

Last time we saw this project, we were working on both back and sound board. Those are done for the moment. It's time to tackle the neck of the instrument, so we can start to assemble the whole thing.

Flattening

We start off by fattening all the faces of the strip of wood. This is done with a sanding block and a trick. If your draw pencils lines on the surface and sand until you remove them, the surface is magically flattened.

To check this out, we can draw lines along the width using a carpenter's square. If all lines are aligned and straight, everything is good to go!

Drawing

Once all the faces are even, we can draw the guiding lines. This are for the fretboard and side cut. Also we'll mark the exact place of the head cut and the cutting angle.

Cut

With the drawing in place, we can start cutting the head with a saw. If you are careful enough, we will save us sanding time. Of course, we will still need to sand some more to even out the resulting wedge.

And once the wedge is ready, we can glue it back to the neck to form the base of the head of the instrument.

_{Note: this process is very difficult and frustrating at times. In the video, I cut a whole lot of time. The piece moves a lot and it's hard to keep the place it should be.}

Making the heel

While the head glues, we move onto the heel. This is the piece where the sides meet the neck. It is one of the important building blocks of this kind of instrument. To make it, we need to cut some wood blocks of around the same length. We even their faces and then, go ahead and glue them together. Once they are one block, we proceed to glue them on the other end of the neck.

The reason behind using several blocks of wood for the heel has todo with structure. When we use pieces of wood like this, we have to make sure to make a alternating the grain of the wood. This will give us a very strong foundation for such an important piece of the instrument.

The heel is like the heart of the instrument if we are talking about it's structure. All the go glued to it. It needs to be solid. Alternative the grain not only serves this purpose, but it also prevents wood from bending when there are humidity changes.

_{Note: in case you didn't know wood keeps moving even when after is has been cut and dried out. The grain keeps shifting while it absorbs humidity and dries up. Many pieces of furniture have mechanism to deal with this changes. Instruments are no different. As they are always in tension, there's a need to prevent wood from moving too much as it could alter the sounds and function of the whole thing.}

Conclusion.

We are done for today. Next time we will see how the rest of the details are done. And we'll have a finished neck ready to start the whole assembly process.

I hope you have a great day!