Tech Guys

I received my alder block via FedEx yesterday. I was surprised they shipped FedEx overnight, when I paid for UPS ground. Score!

Problem with the block: it's a half-inch too short to fit my design. If I tilt my pattern on the block it will fit, but then the wood grain is not straight with the neck. Is this a strength issue I should be concerned about?

I also wanted to do a natural finish (no paint), but I think it would look odd.

So do I alter my design to fit the block, keep it and don't worry about the angled grain, or keep it and paint the body?

There are a few things we need to know before we proceed, the length of the neck, the width at the nut and the width at the widest part of the heel. Is it a two octave neck, I.e. a 24 fret neck if it had frets, if so it will encroach further into the body than a 20 fret neck, we will be fitting the pick ups where a natural harmonic occurs, and the 24th fret position is a natural harmonic. Also let's talk routers, I bought a mid range router for £70 and it works fine, it takes imperial sized cutters, avoid a router that uses metric cutters. It should also accept a Trend universal base plate or better still, come with it's own base plate, this is where the cutter guide fits, it looks like a metal Top Hat with a hole in the top, they come in a few different sizes. Let's assume you get a 1“ cutter guide and a 5/8” straight cutter, now, fit them to the router and using a steel rule measure from the outside of the guide to the widest point of the cutter, this will be the measurement that we need to reduce the template by. Cut out your paper template and get a pair of compasses, ( from an art shop for drawing circles). Fit the pencil and set our measurement between the point of the pencil and the point of the compass, now, resting the pin on the outside of our paper template and the pencil on the inside, go around the template making a pencil line all the way around, once this is done, cut around the pencil line. Something you need to do before this is cut out a paper neck template to the exact size of the neck, no need to put the headstock on the template, just the fingerboard. Mark the centre of the nut end and the centre of the heel end and draw a straight line between these points. On the body template (before trimming) Mark the centre of the neck socket as it is now and Mark the centre point between the widest part of the lower bout, now connect these points with a straight line. Now measure up from the bottom of the body 4“ and draw a line square to the centre line, this represents the bridge saddles, lay the neck template on the body template and check that the pencil lines match up and are straight along the full length, now measure from the end of the fingerboard to the bridge saddle line, this must be 34”, check that the lines are still straight and draw a line either side of the neck heel. These two lines now give you the position of the neck socket, incorporate them into your design and do the marking and trimming mentioned earlier. Let me know when you have done this and we can move on

Question: why not cut the body with a jig saw and sand it down? I'm having a hard time figuring out how to router cut the horns with the ply template correctly.

all will be revealed tonight

Before you cut the paper template make a copy of the actual size as we will need this aswell.