By: John Page
This time I’ll show you some of the work involved with the building of Number One’s neck. A lot of folks think it’s pretty much as easy as sticking some frets into a piece of Maple… well it’s not quite that simple… at least on the P-1. I’ll be breaking the neck building into at least 2-3 different Functional Art articles, because there is just so much to cover. In fact, there are tons more steps than what I’m outlining here, but if I keep taking the time to document this build, instead of building it, I think I’m going to be upsetting my very patient client, Mr. Eddie James.
Anyway, here goes. The neck starts with me contacting my good friend Lawrence Berndt for some Maple. Lawrence used to sell me a good portion of the hard Maple we used at the Fender Custom Shop. He knows his wood like crazy, and he had never let me down in all the years I’ve dealt with him. He was kind enough to continue dealing with me now, even though I only buy little bits at a time… what a guy! I asked him to supply me with a specific size and spec of Maple blank. I use three pieces for every two necks. Once the Maple got to my shop I sticker stacked it and let it acclimate for 60-90 days.
After the Maple has acclimated, I join and plane it to dimension and sort it by color. My next step is to tap tone each piece. If the gods are smiling, I can put three color matched and tone matched pieces together in a blank. If I don’t have a good color match, but the tone match is good, then I group them to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible, but without question, the tone match is the most important. I’ll lose about 15-25% of the pieces due to unacceptable tap tone quality. Once the Maple is sorted, I match it up with the Honduran Mahogany veneers that I cut (also selected for tone, I lose about 50% of these), and glue them up into a double neck blank.
The glued up blanks cure for 30 days. After the cure cycle, I bandsaw out the rough neck blanks. Each double blank will yield 2 necks. After bandsawing they cure for another 30 days.
Then I glue on the peghead “wings”, and let the blank cure for another 2 weeks.
While the neck blanks are curing, I re-saw selected hard Maple for the peghead overlays. I like to find either really nicely flamed stock or something that’s just very cool and unique in its figure. After I re-saw and sand the overlays to thickness, I cut them to size and then glue them together with a dyed black Holly veneer, to make the overlay sandwich. These will cure for 7-14 days.
After the neck blanks have finished the aforementioned cure cycle, I need to true the face of the neck where the fretboard will attach. Due to the multiple piece sandwich, and the figured grain, I don’t machine join the face. I do it the extremely old school way of “shooting” it… hand sanding it on a piece of sandpaper glued to an ultra-flat surface (in this case my 1956 Delta Unisaw (original Fender Fullerton machinery… yeah baby!).
Then the peghead has to be faced and trued to the neck face.
Tooling and fretboard alignment holes are drilled into the neck face.
Tuning key holes are drilled into the peghead.
The neck butt is thickness routed.
Now it’s time to work on the fretboard. I left out all of the tears I shed when I lost several Brazilian fretboards due to a planer malfunction… what a day that was! After thickness sanding and sawing the fretboards to the appropriate dimensions, I slotted them on the table saw.
Then I sanded a rough 12” radius on the face.
Then I dialed in and fine sanded the radius…
and drilled tooling and alignment holes.
I drew the outline on it for bandsawing.
And bandsawed it.
I use the nut and the fretboard to properly locate the peghead overlay on the neck for glue-up. I use a beveled bone nut and I like the overlay to have a matching bevel, so the fit has to be exact.
After the glue dries for three hours, I re-drill the key holes, trace the peghead perimeter onto it and then bandsaw it out.
The final result is still very far away from a final neck, but it’s getting closer! Tooling and alignment holes are in place, the key holes are drilled, the overlay is glued on, the fretboard is slotted, radiused and pinned into place. The next steps will be to install the truss rod and mounting bolt inserts, glue on the fretboard and rough shape the neck before yet another 30 day cure cycle. We’ll cover that soon, but the in next column, I’ll pick up the body where I left it… in a cure cycle. Imagine that!
