Neck Joint Cutting - For Real

Sunday, June 7, 2009.

Well I finally cut my neck joint - this was the step I feared the most (so far). Having never attempted a dovetail joint before, I was just new I would mess it up to the point that I would have to start all over. Fortunately, it looks like this won’t be the case - at least not for this reason, anyway.



Cutting the body side of the joint was really straight forward since the design has this cut square with the body. Since I have yet to attach the back, the rim sets nicely on my bandsaw and once the shape was transferred from the template, it was as simple to cut as you could want.

As you can see from the photos, I ended up needing to install a shim on one side of my dovetail. This is a piece of the same maple veneer I have used elsewhere and ended up being necessary once I got finished trimming and sanding the curved section of the joint on both the neck and the body. The veneer turned out to be almost exactly the right thickness right out of the box. All I did was to cut a section the right length and width, glue it on to the side of the joint and let it set up before attaching the neck.

You will also notice that there is a spacer that has been attached to the head-block. Because the fretboard will eventually extend over the body but not be attached to it, there needs to be a support onto which it will attach. Furthermore, the design has a binding strip that matches up to with the 15th fret (I will be installing that pretty soon) and yet another extension that will act as a support out over the body. This piece fills the gap between the neck joint and the 15th fret that would otherwise be there. If this is not all perfectly clear, I imagine it will be once I get that part done and some photos up. In the mean time, here are some pictures of the joint in neck.




And finally, here is the joint glued together.






In addition to the shim I talked about earlier, I added a very thin shim to the opposite side of the dovetail in the back. I installed this shim as my last step just after the joint was made up. It acted to really tighten the joint up and to add just a tiny amount of twist that I needed to square the plane of the fretboard with the body.

When you look at the back of the joint, you will probably notice that the base of the neck is set back a bit from the body. This is a result of my over zealous sanding way, way back when I was first shaping the neck. I realized pretty early that this would likely be a problem at this stage, but figured it was a small enough issue that I would go ahead with it rather than to make a another neck. Since I intend to finish this part of the mandolin quite dark and this is not a critical piece, I plan to make a maple shim to fit here.

This can be our little secret.

Now to let the glue dry and get started working on the rest of the fretboard.

Carving the Replacement Soundboard

Monday, May 4, 2009.

Not a lot got done in the last week, but enough I guess to still say I am moving ahead even if much of it was put in to remaking the soundboard.

I started the week by removing the clamps from the peghead where I had glued the front veneer and then gluing on the back veneer. The front veneer is ebony wood and the back is simply a thin maple.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that virtually no glue got into the truss rod pocket so that little mistake didn't end up hurting.


Then I moved on to the soundboard. Unlike the original soundboard, the raw wood for this one came in a bit warped which made it a bit more difficult to glue up and then made it a lot more important to plane flat before starting to carve. This is not really a straight forward thing to do when your would is not flat on both sides but rather wedge shaped. Obviously, a method must be found to allow the wedged side to face down while feeding it through the power-planer. For this, I remembered reading that Lynn Dudenbostel uses a couple of strips of wood as supports - so I thought I would try it.

I dug out a long, thin piece of scrap wood that shipped as a stiffener with something else (I can’t remember what), cut it in half, and glued it onto the spruce blank.


Knowing that the areas where the glue is applied (pretty much only under the clamps) is going to be carved away anyway and that the strips themselves are nothing more than scrap, I figured the gluing was a pretty good method for making sure the strips stayed in the same location from one pass to the next. Seems I was right.


Once I had the one side nice and flat and my outline drawn on, it was time to carve. Here is where I am as of now.


As you might notice, unlike the first soundboard, I have begun carving the scroll as well as the body on this one. I decided to abandon the idea of carving the ivy leaves on the scroll as I had originally planned and go forward with a traditional scroll. I made this choice because I am finding that this project is challenging enough without this additional feature. I will, however, go ahead with the inlay as I had previously planned.

Installing the Peghead Veneer

Sunday, April 26, 2009.

Yesterday I got a few honey-do list projects done and then got to spend a little time prepping and gluing the new soundboard together. I chose not to include pictures of that since they would be of little difference than the ones I posted for the first. That was about all I got done on Saturday.

Today, while the soundboard glue continues to cure, I took to the task of gluing my peghead veneer onto the peghead. Since, once the instrument is completed, the veneer will be butted directly against the nut and, since the nut is perpendicular to the fretboard rather than the peghead, the first step in this process is to prep one edge of the veneer to the angle of the nut.

I had done this a couple of weeks ago using a drawing from Mr. Siminoff’s book, so all I had to do today was to verify the angle still looked good to me. Holding against the peghead as if glued on, the angle of the edge appears to be perpendicular to the fretboard as it should be. Looks good.

On to the next step - sanding the peghead smooth to make it ready for gluing.

As you may recall, the last thing that I did on the neck and peghead was to install the circular scroll reinforcement. When I put the neck aside, I had not sanded down the reinforcement. So that is what I did. Since the reinforcement still protruded quite a bit, I started by using my hand-plane to remove the majority of the protrusion. Once it was close to level, I switched over to sanding with 320 grit paper on my orbital palm sander. This process only took a few minutes and now, with a silky smooth surface on which to glue, I was ready to get back to work on the veneer.

I started by match-marking the centerline on the nut and point edges of the veneer to match those on the peghead. Now that I had my reference points, I was ready to mark the outline of the peghead onto the veneer using my pattern and a mechanical pencil.


That completed, I retraced the same pattern onto the peghead itself.


With matching patterns on the peghead and the veneer, I was able to lay the veneer on the peghead, verify they lined up, and then clamp them in place so I could drill for alignment pins.

The alignment pins are nothing more than finishing nails with their heads cut off that are located in the “junk” area of the peghead blank. By putting them in during the gluing process, I am assured that the veneer will align exactly where I want it, without slipping, while clamping and the glue setting. I cut off the heads of the nails so that the gluing caul (a 3/4” piece of plywood) would push them flush with the veneer without interfering with the clamping itself.

After cutting out a hole to roughly match the truss rod pocket, I was ready to glue.

Once again using hide-glue, I liberally applied the glue and clamped up.


After taking these shots, I also added one more clamp right over the truss rod pocket.

MISTAKE (I stopped counting) - Just after I had applied my glue and started clamping, I realized I had not cut a hole in my gluing caul over the truss rod pocket. This hole would have allowed me to clear out any glue that oozed into the truss rod pocket. Now, I will have to wait until the assembly is dry and chip/sand/scrape the glue out. Not too bad (I hope), but still a pain nonetheless.