Dan Armstrong Replica Part 4

Time to knock the neck out.

We’ve already got the neck blank, which is a 3-piece quartersawn laminate with decorative veneers between the maple.

The headstock angle was cut to 13 degrees on the mitre saw and the neck blank cut from the larger piece.

I needed to mill the back of the headstock to get it to the proper thickness as well as make it parallel to the front, flat, and smooth.

I didn’t get photos, but I used the method I have previously described: putting a router on a jig with rails and placing the neck blank face down on the bench.

It’s a jury-rigged thickness planer of a sort. Here’s an illustration I wish I could attribute to my 3 year old goddaughter, but I did it:

There are actually only a few steps in making a neck, but I still manage to mix them up or do them poorly at least once on every build, so there is always excitement!

The first thing I try to do is rout for the truss rod. I want to do it while I have the full width of the blank to support the jig I have made for this purpose.

Here it is being used on one of my previous projects:

 I originally built it for the Stew Mac Hot Rod truss rod, but it can be used for others as well.

On this build, I decided to go with the traditional Gibson-type truss rod:

I actually only bought the anchor, nut and washer; I bought the stainless steel rod locally. I also bought the proper thread cutting die.

Cutting threads is really not easy. I tried and I tried and I tried and I gave up.

So I went to see my favorite machine shop, tucked away on a side street in Mong Kok. I have had them make Floyd Rose ‘big blocks’ out of brass for me several times.

These guys are old school and hard core.

They work in flip-flops.  No eye protection, no hearing protection.

The language barrier would probably be a source of hilarity on a TV show; my Cantonese is rudimentary at best and their English is nonexistent.

I was lucky this time, since I had the steel rod, the thread cutter, and the boss was in a good mood. In less than five minutes, and for about US$5, the rod was threaded, the anchor installed and peened. That means the end of the rod gets hit with a ball peen (!) hammer so that the rod can’t be removed from the anchor.

This type of truss rod requires that a channel be routed into the neck, preferably with a curved bottom

Which is difficult in Hong Kong, since 99% of the bottoms are flat. But I digress.

I accomplished this curvature by routing slightly deeper in the middle once I hit the right depth at the ends.

I needed to drill for the anchor, and realized that it would have been much better to do that before I had routed the channel.

Live and learn.

Then I needed to cut into the face of the headstock to make room for the truss rod nut as well as room for the tool that adjusts it.

This was accomplished with chisels and patience.

I also needed to cut a filler strip for the truss rod channel. I used some mahogany because I had it lying around and it cuts more easily than maple. It ended up a tiny bit short, but I am sure it is not going to cause failure.

I installed the truss rod and filler strip, and after the glue dried I cut the strip flush with the rest of the neck.

Using a neck template that I had, I cut the neck and the fretboard slightly larger than their finished dimensions, then routed them smooth.

Well, that was the plan.

I had a little tear-out on the fretboard, but repaired it.

I shaped the neck with my trusty saw rasp. 

I’m sure there are better and faster methods, but I enjoy carving necks and don’t mind taking my time.

I also installed the side markers and face markers. On the Dan Armstrong, the face dots are quite small, so I used side dot material. I do this on a lot of my own builds anyway.

I didn’t take any photos of attaching the fretboard or fretting, but it’s pretty standard stuff.

I attached some small pieces of maple to the neck blank to make it wide enough for the headstock, because it was now time to cut out the headstock.

I looked at photos of the originals:

I decided to modify it a little, mostly to try and get the string pull to be as straight as I could. I wanted the tuners to converge in the middle so that the D and G tuners were actually touching at the set screw loops.

I cut out the shape I had drawn and drilled for the tuners.

Then I used contact adhesive to attach a piece of Formica to the face of the headstock.

Once the glue was dry, I routed it flush and drilled out the tuner holes.

Too bad it came out looking like this:

Somebody made a whoopsie, and it’s the guy on my ID card!

I am prone to such brain farts, it seems, no matter what I do. I measured and checked and all that stuff, yet I somehow never noticed how wrong it was. 

I had too much time and energy invested in the neck to make firewood out of it, so I removed the Formica, plugged the holes and tried again:

 I decided to cover the back of the headstock with the same veneer I used between the maple. It’s not what I originally wanted, but it looks better than… that.

Second time’s the charm:

Ahhh, that’s better.

To make the truss rod cover, I again found a good photo of a real one,

and using Paint I made up a template:

Which I then printed out at the correct size,  taped to the Formica, and cut out by hand.

 Note the masking tape on the Formica to protect it. It has a protective film, but once the edges get loose it’s easier to peel it and use the tape.

Near the machine shop in Mong Kok there is a place that sells all manner of safety equipment. For a few dollars, I bought a couple feet of 3M glow-in-the-dark tape. It’s used to mark edges on stairs and that sort of thing:

Using a couple of leather punches, I made 2.5mm and 4mm dots to go on the fretboard.

This stuff really sticks, and it’s very useful on underlit stages (i.e. the ones I play on 99% of the time).

I needed to attach the neck to the body. I didn’t want to use the original method of neck attachment:

It removes a lot of wood from the neck.  And while I liked the way these bolts looked on the back,

I couldn’t find that hardware anyway.

So I went with wood screws and ferrules, which I found in… Mong Kok.

The screws are heftier than average neck attachment screws, but that’s a good thing, really.

One of the positive aspects of working with clear material is that it is possible to see things you otherwise could not. So when I drilled the neck attachment holes in the body, it was really easy to match the centerlines of the neck and body in the pocket.

Not that I had much choice, since the neck fit so snugly in the pocket that there was no literal wiggle room. But it was nice to see something go right.

I think the ferrules and screws look good, so I am not too disappointed at straying from the original.

In comparing the original and mine, you can see how rough my cavities are. At least the neck pocket looks okay.