1

2

Sand prodruding parts down to body surface

3 The neck block has to be thicker than the body. It is glued in slightly angled.

Straight-through neck

Although building a guitar with straight-through neck might appear easier than building one with bolted-on neck, it is actually the more difficult type to build. If you are going to build a straight-through-necked guitar, a bandsaw and a jointer are an absolute must and the sides of the neck block and the body have to be planed perfectly flat.

Everything else can be done as usual. Remember: when making a through-necked guitar you always have to move and work the whole guitar, which basically means more trouble and more work, requires more space and is overall more difficult.

The peghead can be made in the same way as on bolted-on or glued-in necks. In the above picture I simply cut it directly from the neck block at an angle of 10 degrees. The neck should be 19mm (3/4" ) thick (leave it slightly thicker to start with, just to make sure) between the neck-body transition area and the nut. Just before the point where the neck and the body meet the neck block has to reach body thickness. To make it easier to shape this curved transition area, choose a curve radius identical with one of your sanding drums. Then cut out the body sides. It is also advisable to smooth the cutaways at this stage.

The pieces left over from cutting out the body can be used as clamping cauls for gluing on the body sides (1). By putting a layer of cork in between you can compensate for any irregularities. The pictures shows a neck that was glued into the body at an angle of only a few degrees to the body surface. For determining the necessary angle it is very important that you make a full-scale drawing on a large sheet of paper. The prodruding parts of the neck at the back and the front of the body are sanded down later (3). To get the best action possible you might, however, also glue in the neck at a 0-degree angle and further sand down the part of the neck block after the fingerboard. For details, please refer to the section on design and the following section.

Straight-through necks are shaped in much the same way as other types of neck; only the area where the neck “melts” into the body is slightly more difficult to deal with (2).

Making a neck-through headless bass

I designed this bass full-scale on a computer monitor using CorelDraw before printing the outlines of the body wings onto several separate sheets of paper. By putting a check into the “tile”-box in the print window I got four sheets that could be taped together. I chose the huge cherry plank on the left (1) for the body wings because of its promising grain pattern. After removing wormholes, knots, splits and cracks, and subsequent sawing and planing, all that remained was a narrow piece of wood just long enough to make up the two body wings (2). Three of the four faces were jointed square to each other before the blank was thickness-planed to 45mm (1¾").

After carefully bandsawing the body to shape (3) I smoothed as much as possible on a disc sander (4) before finishing the job with the drum sander. I didn’t use the router for smoothing the sides because the relatively small pieces would have brought the fingers dangerously close to the bit. You could try it with safety handles, as shown below (5), but the irregular grain pattern of the body wings makes it very difficult to get smooth sides anyway.

I decided to shape the body wings as separate pieces and before gluing them to the neck blank. This way I didn't have to move around the whole guitar, which I always find quite annoying.

I rounded off the edges with an elliptical round-over bit, 57mm 1 (21/4") in diameter. I didn’t take any risks and guided the small

pieces of wood that were to become the body with safety handles (5) which I simply taped to the body pieces with two long strips of thin double-stick tape. I rounded off each edge separately in at least three passes. Be extremely careful at the left corners: start the cut about half an inch or so from the corner and cautiously move the wood towards it, i.e. in the "wrong" routing direction. Better round off the last bit by hand than to expose the corner to the revolving bit, which could literally take the whole job out of your hands.

2

16th Fret

20th Fret

23rd Fret

25th Fret

1

Measurements in millimeters

Offset (O) =

Saddle height (S) - Fingerboard thickness (F*)

* Height F includes fret height

2

To assist positioning the body wings when gluing them to the neck I drilled two 8mm (5/16") dowel holes into each body wing side (1).

As I have already mentioned it is important to take the bridge height into account early enough when building a neck-through guitar. You can build in a small angle, as described earlier, or you can make a step at the fingerboard end. I opted for the latter, and, after measuring the minimum saddle height - which turned out to be 14mm - and a fingerboard thickness of 6mm made the above drawing.

For making the neck I prepared an almost perfect maple blank (2) with a closed, straight grain pattern: 52mm (2") thick, 80mm (3") wide and 1 meter (3 feet) long. If you aren’t making a headless bass, as I am here, add 20cm (8") for the peghead.

I decided to have the truss rod adjustment nut at the head end and to have it covered by the head part of the tuning unit. It is possible to drill an access hole into the head part, but since removing and putting on strings is quite easy on a headless guitar, removing the head part each time when an adjustment is required should be no problem. I was also anxious not to spoil such expensive hardware.

I cut the truss rod slot with a 6mm round-bottom bit (accurately fitting to the truss rod to be used) in order to leave as much wood as possible. An 8mm round-bottom bit made room for the adjusting nut. To add extra stiffness I decided to install two 1/8"x 3/8"x 24" carbon fiber rods in the neck. I used a 1/8" bit for cutting the channels, glued the rods in with wood glue and sanded them flush to the surface (3).

I bought an ebony fingerboard that was already slotted and radiused. For gluing it on the neck I used the simple clamping caul shown in picture 4 (left of the neck blank): under pressure the two cork strips adapt to the fingerboard radius, thus assuring a thin, tight glue line. The slots provide room for the tiny wire brads that keep the fingerboard from slipping during gluing.

Finally, I transferred the taper of the neck onto the neck blank and carefully planed it on the jointer (5).

The body offset is best made with a jointer that allows lowering the infeed table by the seven millimeters that are required. Since I didn't have access to such a jointer, I routed the body part down to the right thickness using a big surface trim bit as shown in picture 6.

I used the Stewart Macdonald fretting arbor in my drill press for installing the frets. First I seated the fret ends by pressing them in with a tight radius caul (in this case the radius was 12"). Then I seated the entire fret with a caul matching the 16" fretboard radius (7). Finally the fret was set firmly on both ends and all the way across the board.

After installing 12 frets I got bored and filled the remaining fret slots with mahogany veneer strips that I had sanded to a thickness matching exactly the width of the fret slots. In this way I got a „normal“ and a fretless bass in one instrument, which I quite like. Such a bass model was already produced by Ibanez back in 1983 (or be it without commercial success), so I can’t claim to be the inventor of a new model.

Well, to tell you the truth, filling the slots with exactly-match- ing veneer strips is what I should have done. Since the veneer I had at hand was slightly thicker, I decided to widen the slots with a backsaw (8). However, after gluing in the strips and cutting them flush with a chisel (9) I was not satisfied with my sloppy cuts and had the great idea of using the table saw to cut new, wider slots. Since the neck blank was already tapered, I had to adjust the rip fence accordingly. The first cut was made with confidence - and turned out as not being parallel to the frets. It is in moments like these that I feel like giving up guitarbuilding forever. The extremely wide mahogany inserts that you can see in the pictures on the facing page prove that I somehow managed to correct the slanted cut. Can anything be learned from this? Do as much as possible while the neck blank is square! The same applies when it comes to cutting the neck to thickness (10) which is ideally done after installing the frets (I had only 12 frets to install, so it worked for me although I did things the other way round).

6

7

8

1

2

3

I marked the holes for the body wing dowels on the neck blank with metal dowel hole markers (1). Such markers are commercially available (at least in my part of the world). For drilling the holes into the neck blank I used the same set-up as on the body wings. If you want to use the drill press, note that the neck blank surfaces are slanted and that the table has to be tilted to get holes that are square to the surface. My “drill-stand method” automatically takes care of that.

Before I glued on the body wings I marked their upper ends on the neck blank and shaped as much of the neck profile as possible (2). Rough-shaping the body-neck transition is also easier without the wings glued on.

I glued on the body wings with the help of two straps such as those commonly used for tying up baggage (3). They give sufficient strength, are gentle to the wood and adapt very readily to the already-shaped body. Since most of the shaping had already been done, little in the way of sanding was required after this.

The other steps of work involved in building a neck-through headless bass don’t differ from bolt-on-neck guitars and are described in detail throughout this book.