neck thickness/headstock thickeness

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MattW
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neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by MattW » Sun Apr 02, 2017 6:42 pm

The head stock on most guitars is around 14-18mm thick, where the neck at the body join is around the 22mm or so, plus the fret board. So when making the neck, the stock would be ~22mm. How does everyone cut the scarf joint out of the one neck blank, then thickness the head stock back from the 22mm to around the 15mm for the head stock?
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Matt

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Steve.Toscano
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by Steve.Toscano » Sun Apr 02, 2017 7:01 pm

I cut the scarf joint and then plane down the shorter surface of the headstock to thickness. Once the scarf is glued up i plane the headstock area flat.

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by simso » Sun Apr 02, 2017 7:04 pm

This may help,

I did a walk through of how I cut my scarf joints for making necks, both classical and acoustic, I do each of these differently

Page 2 - half way down, I use a circular saw to size it up, bandsaw, planer, belt sander these would all work just fine

On a day when my head is not in the right space, I like to get out a hand plane and do it, something calming about rolls of swarf parting from wood that I find calming.

Steve

http://www.mirwa.com.au/HTS_Headstock_Scarf_Joint.html
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by kiwigeo » Sun Apr 02, 2017 7:13 pm

I do the scarf joint and then plane top of headstock to end thickness. I leave laying out heel block end of the neck until the headstock is dressed to final thickness. My necks get tapered once heel block is glued up using a Safe-T-Planer.
Martin

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by simso » Sun Apr 02, 2017 8:02 pm

Martin, you mention you taper the necks with stewmac's safety planer, is that correct.

How are you jigging this may I ask, for info I use a belt sander to shape my neck profiles.

Steve
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by kiwigeo » Sun Apr 02, 2017 8:12 pm

simso wrote:Martin, you mention you taper the necks with stewmac's safety planer, is that correct.

How are you jigging this may I ask, for info I use a belt sander to shape my neck profiles.

Steve
Yes using a Wagner Safety Planer (Stewmac sells them). I place the neck on a wedge shaped holding jig with a couple of tabs that register into the truss rod slot....as per Gore and Gilet's books.
Martin

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by simso » Sun Apr 02, 2017 8:28 pm

Next time you do one, can you post some photos, would be pretty cool to see

Thanks

Steve
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by rocket » Sun Apr 02, 2017 9:32 pm

kiwigeo wrote:
simso wrote:Martin, you mention you taper the necks with stewmac's safety planer, is that correct.

How are you jigging this may I ask, for info I use a belt sander to shape my neck profiles.

Steve
Yes using a Wagner Safety Planer (Stewmac sells them). I place the neck on a wedge shaped holding jig with a couple of tabs that register into the truss rod slot....as per Gore and Gilet's books.
Good idea with the tabs there Martin, i use the wedge for thicknessing the neck but without the tabs you've described, think i'll make that addition!!

Cheers

Rod.
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by rocket » Sun Apr 02, 2017 9:34 pm

rocket wrote:
kiwigeo wrote:
simso wrote:Martin, you mention you taper the necks with stewmac's safety planer, is that correct.

How are you jigging this may I ask, for info I use a belt sander to shape my neck profiles.

Steve
Yes using a Wagner Safety Planer (Stewmac sells them). I place the neck on a wedge shaped holding jig with a couple of tabs that register into the truss rod slot....as per Gore and Gilet's books.
Good idea with the tabs there Martin, i use the wedge for thicknessing the neck but without the tabs you've described, think i'll make that addition!!

Cheers

Rod.
i also use the Safe-T-Planer to thickness/taper the peg head too..

Rod.
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by simso » Sun Apr 02, 2017 9:36 pm

It would be good to see, always learning new stuff, have never seen a neck profiled with the safety planer.

Steve
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by Dave M » Mon Apr 03, 2017 6:24 am

Not having a safety planer I set up a jig to do it with a router. As with G&G I thickness the underside of the neck and the head.

It is essentially a trough with the neck supported at the shallow angle required, with the router running on the top of the trough. The bolt bar in the heel is useful here as in many other operations for fixing the neck. I use wedges to keep the neck fixed against the walls of the box. I do the same thing for the headstock but I haven't shown any pics because the clamping system with wedges and so on is not so satisfactory and I wouldn't recommend the way I currently do it.

Hope the pics show the setup.
Attachments
Thin 1small.jpg
Thin 3small.jpg
Thin 2small.jpg
------------------
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by rocket » Mon Apr 03, 2017 11:37 am

I like it Dave, necessity is the mother of invention, well done.
Cheers.

Rod
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by Steve.Toscano » Mon Apr 03, 2017 3:09 pm

While we're showing off jigs. Here's my neck shaping 'jigs'.....
Repeatable, and precise neck shaping & tapering in ~10mins everytime. :gui :toi
2017-04-03 15.03.44.jpg
2017-04-03 15.03.44.jpg (135.28 KiB) Viewed 21097 times

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by kiwigeo » Mon Apr 03, 2017 4:42 pm

Steve.T wrote:While we're showing off jigs. Here's my neck shaping 'jigs'.....
Repeatable, and precise neck shaping & tapering in ~10mins everytime. :gui :toi
2017-04-03 15.03.44.jpg
I often go "manual" but when you've got a truss rod channel (I use rods in my classicals) you sometimes want to go as close as possible to the bottom of the channel but without breaking through into same. The jig and Safe-T-Planer for is a safer way of thicknessing a truss rodded neck.
Martin

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by simso » Mon Apr 03, 2017 6:51 pm

Looks like a veritas spoke shave

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by kiwigeo » Mon Apr 03, 2017 9:21 pm

Will do Steve,

Busy sorting out my stash of tonewood at present so benches are covered in mountains of wood. Will be back building in a few weeks time hopefully and will take some pics of the neck jig in action.
simso wrote:Next time you do one, can you post some photos, would be pretty cool to see

Thanks

Steve
Martin

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by Steve.Toscano » Tue Apr 04, 2017 12:20 am

kiwigeo wrote:
Steve.T wrote:While we're showing off jigs. Here's my neck shaping 'jigs'.....
Repeatable, and precise neck shaping & tapering in ~10mins everytime. :gui :toi
2017-04-03 15.03.44.jpg
I often go "manual" but when you've got a truss rod channel (I use rods in my classicals) you sometimes want to go as close as possible to the bottom of the channel but without breaking through into same. The jig and Safe-T-Planer for is a safer way of thicknessing a truss rodded neck.
Many ways to ..... :)
How deep is your truss rod channel? The rods i use are 8mm (i think by memory) to go scary close to that id have to have a ~15mm thick neck inc fretboard eg incredibly thin.
My classicals are 21.5mm at their thinnest - 1st fret (leaving some ~7 - 8mm of meat left before my truss rod channel), and 24mm at the 9th fret.
I can comfortably go to 22 and 24.5 with the spoke shave just by look and feel nowadays. The rest comes off with a quick blade reset on the shave and abrasives.
simso wrote:Looks like a veritas spoke shave

Steve
Correct. Funnily enough i bought that guy on a whim. Cost me $160.
The smaller stanley one pictured cost me $18 on ebay 2nd hand.
And guess which one i reach for first and use 95% of the time. Hint: its not the expensive one. :oops:
However, the veritas does have a very nice blade.

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by kiwigeo » Tue Apr 04, 2017 8:18 am

Steve.T wrote:
Many ways to ..... :)
How deep is your truss rod channel? The rods i use are 8mm (i think by memory) to go scary close to that id have to have a ~15mm thick neck inc fretboard eg incredibly thin.
My classicals are 21.5mm at their thinnest - 1st fret (leaving some ~7 - 8mm of meat left before my truss rod channel), and 24mm at the 9th fret.
I can comfortably go to 22 and 24.5 with the spoke shave just by look and feel nowadays. The rest comes off with a quick blade reset on the shave and abrasives.
My rods requite at least a 10mm deep trench. Ill often go as close as 4mm to the trench at the headstock end of the trench....ie 14mm neck thickness (not including fretboard). I establish the neck thickness first with the safe-T-planer and once thats done I dont touch the centreline on the back of the neck with the spokeshaves during subsequent shaping.
Martin

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by Kamusur » Tue Apr 04, 2017 10:29 am

Excellent tutorial Steve "simso"

Steve

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by simso » Tue Apr 04, 2017 2:07 pm

Thanks,

I am very interested in peoples ways of shaping the back of the neck with safety planer and jig.

Currently I use a belt sander and measure as I go, but can see real merits in planing to a height and then shaping from there, good idea..

Steve
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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by MattW » Tue Apr 04, 2017 6:17 pm

Thanks everyone ,all good food for thought.

The reason I ask i I remade the neck for the guitar I'm building (after cutting the tenon 5mm to one side on the first one!) The stock I used is around 25mm thick. When i cut the scarf joint, flipped it over and glued it, I need to thickness the head-stock down by about 10mm. If I do this on the front face of the head stock it will move the end of the fret board surface about30mm towards the body end, and will make the overall neck length too short.

Hope that makes sense! Would be ordinary to bin it and make a third neck...

If I take it off the back side of the head stock I should be right! Just how to do It? I could set up a jig and cross cut with a panel saw down to the thickness, then chisel and plane.
Cheers

Matt

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by Steve.Toscano » Tue Apr 04, 2017 7:53 pm

MattW wrote:
If I take it off the back side of the head stock I should be right! Just how to do It? I could set up a jig and cross cut with a panel saw down to the thickness, then chisel and plane.
Just use a block plane and plane off the back, going across the grain down near the join. If worried about chip out at the sides when going cross just take off the corner with a chisel, make sure blade is sharp and finely set when getting close to final thickness.

I had to do this in my first few builds when i kept forgetting to thickness the headstock piece pre glue up and ending up in the same situation you are in now with the body end already to size.

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by jeffhigh » Wed Apr 05, 2017 6:45 pm

MattW wrote:The head stock on most guitars is around 14-18mm thick,
Make sure you check the thickness requirement for your tuners. The total thickness of the headstock, including any veneers need to be right for your tuners.

For example, I have had Matons come through here where I had to put about 8 turns on the high E to get any break angle across the nut because the string posts were so high above the face.
And other Matons where the headstock was so thick that the threaded ferrules were lucky to engage by 1 turn (and some had stripped)

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by ckngumbo » Thu Apr 06, 2017 7:27 am

simso wrote:This may help,

I did a walk through of how I cut my scarf joints for making necks, both classical and acoustic, I do each of these differently

Page 2 - half way down, I use a circular saw to size it up, bandsaw, planer, belt sander these would all work just fine

On a day when my head is not in the right space, I like to get out a hand plane and do it, something calming about rolls of swarf parting from wood that I find calming.

Steve

http://www.mirwa.com.au/HTS_Headstock_Scarf_Joint.html
Great walkthrough thanks!
Rob Francis

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Re: neck thickness/headstock thickeness

Post by kiwigeo » Thu Apr 06, 2017 9:08 am

MattW wrote:
The reason I ask i I remade the neck for the guitar I'm building (after cutting the tenon 5mm to one side on the first one!) The stock I used is around 25mm thick. When i cut the scarf joint, flipped it over and glued it, I need to thickness the head-stock down by about 10mm. If I do this on the front face of the head stock it will move the end of the fret board surface about30mm towards the body end, and will make the overall neck length too short.
As I mentioned in my reply this is the main reason I leave gluing up the heel block until Ive thicknesses the headstock. Once thats done the headstock/neck break point becomes the reference point for measuring out the rest of the neck.

If you have to work the back of the headstock a block plane will do the job if you work it carefully, even better is a chisel plane. Ive got one of these from Veritas. The front of the plane unscrews and allows you to get right into tight corners with the blade.
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