The neck and scroll
Before I did anything I roughly cut out the neck profile to give the wood a few months to settle.
Now with the plates nearly done I levelled the top and squared the sides (they had actually moved appreciably in the intervening 4 months) before cutting the profile more accurately on the bandsaw. I then filed/scraped the outer scroll outline and drilling the peg holes on the drill press before sawing the scroll sections and then started carving.
After much filing, carving and scraping I got here:
Next I rough carved the fluting with chisels
Fingerboard
I bought a pre-shaped blank which reduced the amount of shaping required substantially. First back to the drawing board to get the profile right. I started with the string profile over the end of the fingerboard with a 20 degree break between strings and string heights over the fingerboard from 4mm (A string) to 6.5mm (C string) as I am going to use Larsen steel strings on this.
Fingerboard length will be 5/6 of string length = 580mm but added a few millimetres for luck.
Then extrapolated to get the bridge profile.
Plans are here: fingerboard profile
1st job was to plane the edges straight and take the twist out of the blank.
Then made a template for the fingerboard profile at the end and started planing away with the jack plane to get a rough shape. It is quite hard to check for flatness using a straight edge so I just laid it on a flat surface with a light behind and looked underneath for the dark spots.
Once the rough shape was there I used a scraper to fine tune and get the 1/2 string diameter scoop measured with feelers.
Ended up with 8mm sides with a slight scoop on the edges to keep the wall height in the middle.
After cutting the outline of the neck root ready for fitting to the body I tacked on the fingerboard with a few dabs of weak glue – just hope I will be able to break the joint later!
After fitting to the body I carved and filed the final neck profile and finished off the chamfers on the scroll. Note the chalk on the neck joint from fitting to the body.
