This Is Why We Make Two

Hey everyone! I know it’s been a while, but over the past couple of weeks, I went to Xerocraft several of times, and am pretty close to finishing the neck now. I also have been working on my final presentation for the end of the year and getting ready for graduation, so that’s why I haven’t posted in a while. Well, a lot has happened, but in terms of total visible progress, not much has been done.

The first thing I did was route the necks’ edges. Actually, that’s not true; I sanded first. This was because the router bit is only designed to take off small amounts of wood at a time, so I needed to take down as much of the extra wood that stuck out past the template (which I screwed into the neck). I used a circular sander, like this one, to remove as much of the excess, and it took forever:

Now that one that’s up above appears to be better than the one at Xerocraft, but it does exactly the same thing. I used this one because it has a circular sanding thing, so it was really good for getting the curves on the headstock. When I got pretty close to the template, I moved over to the router. I had to use a special router bit with a bearing on it, because the bearing keeps the blade a set distance from the piece of wood. I set it up so that the bearing was riding on the template, so that the sides of the neck and headstock would be flush with the sides of the template.

The first neck came out very well, and only had a little bit of “router burn,” meaning that the high amount of friction from the spinning blades burned some of the wood, and this happened especially around the curves and end grain.

The second neck, however, was a very different story. I had started sanding, but was getting impatient because I was running low on time at the moment. You see, every Tuesday night at Xerocraft, starting at 6pm, they have something called WTF Hack, which means that only Women, Trans, and Femme persons may be in the shop during that designated block of time. As I am a man, that meant I had to be packed up and out of the building by 6pm, so I decided at the time to do the bare minimum of sanding, and then move over to the router. Most of the neck came out perfectly, but as I moved to the headstock, the blade started to slip upwards, resulting in me having to stop, unplug the machine, unfasten it from the table, make sure the router bit was securely in place, then readjust the height of the bit. I had to keep the bearing in the same place, so every time it started to slip up or down, I had to do this process, and I ended up doing it three or four times. When I got to the end of the headstock, I started out taking very little off at a time, but all of a sudden, the router took the piece of wood from my hand and flung it onto the floor behind me, removing a sizeable chunk from the end.

Because the chunk was intact, I decided to set it aside and glue it on later. At that point, I decided it was still a good idea to continue routing the headstock, so I readjusted the height of the blade and continued in the same spot again… and then the router ripped the neck out of my hands again and flung it across the room. This time, my heart sank when I picked up my piece of wood again.

It had exploded. I was tired at this point and needed to leave, so I came back a few days later to continue work on the fretboard. For the fretboard, I had chosen rosewood so I was putting off working on it as long as possible because it’s so hard to work with. Rosewood is a very hard wood, so you can’t cut very much of it at a time, and the piece that I had was warped so I needed to plane it really, really, really badly. The piece was already close to the thickness I needed, around a quarter inch, so it was too thin to run through the planer on its own. At that thickness, the planer will (depending on the machine) either not be able to take the board in through the feeding rollers or become a missile coming out of the other end of the planer. I wasn’t about to take that chance, so I created a little jig to make it a thickness that could go through the planer with no problems.

I ended up having to put nails into the piece of rosewood so it would stick to the other piece of wood and stay flat. I tried placing the nails in the other piece of wood, cutting the ends with tin snips so that they would be sharp, but when I pressed the rosewood onto it, it just ended up hammering them in further. So that’s why I had to put the nails in the rosewood first. I was able to get it pretty flat, and very close to the thickness that I want.

I also have started on a work-around to the exploded headstock. I decided to cut out all the damaged wood, plus a little bit more in order to get the shape somewhat like a flame-sort-of-thing. I will then cut out the middle part and shape that like an eye, so that I can cast some resin and dye it in order to put a transparent eye in the spot.

And then I haven’t been to Xerocraft since then.

I have, however, been working on the design for the body, so I ended up doing something that will match the headstock of the guitar. This design is somewhat like a MusicLander guitar mixed with a Stratocaster, and I plan on using the CNC router to cut out the entire design in just a few hours.

Of course, I will have to do some prep work; boards of wood are not sold in the width needed for a guitar, so I will have to buy a board that is equal in volume to what I need, cut it, and then glue the pieces side-by-side to get the correct width. And then, I can plane that thing to be able to route it. Well, the end of the school year is coming soon, and I am running out of time to work on this SRP. I will not, however, be ending the project with the end of the school year. I am going to probably start a separate blog from the school one and transfer most of what I have here over there, and then continue posting until I am done. The other thing I might do is post videos to a YouTube channel to show my progress, that way people who are interested can still see what I’m doing with this. I have a lot of other things I wanted to do during the SRP that I didn’t have the time to do, so I will probably explore some of those things in either YouTube videos or a separate blog website thing. I will post links here once I get there (I’ll figure something out in the next couple of weeks) but that’s all for now! My final presentation will be on May 19th at noon-ish so hopefully I’ll see some of you there!