More progress on the tele neck

To date, I have the fingerboard glued on, dot inlays put in, leveled and radius-ed the fingerboard, fretted, and partially carved my tele neck. What I plan on doing is mounting the neck on my telecaster body, and setting it up to play. I'm jumping ahead a few steps, because I want to see how the neck feels in my hand, before putting the oil finish on, and dressing the frets. If I want to slim anything down, I can just take the neck off, and carve away a little more. Once I'm satisfied with what I have, I'll then oil up the neck, dress the frets, do a final set up, and the neck is done.

I'm doing things this way, because I could scuff up my fret work if I wanted to take more wood away on the neck, and I also want the wood to be protected before I do the fret dress.

I have to admit, the pearl dot inlays look real good in the ebony fingerboard.







For those of you who aren't familiar with all the terms i am using, here is a little explanation.

Fret-dressing - Frets are the metal bars the cross the neck of a guitar, and what you press the string against to create different pitches. When frets are dressed, they are leveled out to match up against a straight edge. This way no frets are sticking up higher than any others. Doing so, makes the guitar play very cleanly, and helps with the sound quality, and keeps the guitar intonated correctly. And not to drag, I dress frets better than any of the big time custom shops out there. Shall we say it's my calling card.

Inlays - Inlays are usually blocks, or dots of various materials, that are glued into the fingerboard. They indicate where you are on the neck.

Fingerboard radius - The fingerboard of steel string guitars are radius-ed (rounded). Mine are 12" radius. Kind of like the side of a cylinder who's radius is 12", or 24"diameter. Just like dressing frets, you want the fingerboard to be leveled and radius-ed really well. Doing so insures that the neck will adjust uniformly under the tension of the strings, and helps to make sure that when you put your frets in, they are as close to level, before dressing as possible.

Tele Neck Progress

Here are a couple of pictures of my neck.

Test Run

Tuesday night, I started making a second neck for the Telecaster I made 7 years a go. It didn't need a new neck, I'm just doing a test run on my neck design. I figure since the guitars i designed are going to have glued in necks, I better make sure that my templates and sizing etc. are all acceptable.

So that being said, I dug up a piece of maple that's been in my closet for about 5 years, and an ebony fingerboard I salvaged off another neck. It's going to be a simple design, flat-sawn maple tele style neck, ebony board with dot inlays, 12" radius fingerboard, jumbo frets, oil finish. I should have this done in short order. The two dimensions that I am concerned about are the neck profile, and with of the fingerboard.

On the guitars that i designed, I can always reshape the profile a little bit after the neck is on. But as far as the width, I will be stuck with that. In a way, this is an experiment, but I know it will turn out. So any of you guitar players I know, I will be wanting to loan my tele out. I'll want input.

In the picture I am shaping out the peghead on a disc sander.