Enough practice, it’s time to do it for real

5-12-21

I know I've only got one shot to properly carve out the space needed for the neck, and that messing it up would likely result in having to throw away the slab and restart from scratch. For that reason I went ahead and did 4 practice fittings on a scrap piece of walnut. These practice runs helped me figure out what steps to do and in what order, but also helped me refine my template, how it's held in place, and how to manually clean it up at the end to get that extra tight fit.

Today felt right, so after confirming option 2 (angled) is the winner I went ahead and rough cut the guitar body out of the slab. I want’t able to safely use my table saw for these cuts so I resorted to using my hand saw and jig saw.

It was now time to carve out the space for the neck. The method I came up with was to first hog out a fair amount using a 1 inch drill bit, but making sure I don't go past the final depth. Then I attached my template using carpet tape, to prevent it from moving even a tiny bit. I then used the router and 2 different bits to remove the rest of the material, following the template. I then went ahead and tried to fit the neck, using trial and error to see where I needed to sand off a little more wood, in places the router had a hard time reaching.