Cutting Lacerda’s Neck

Guitars are almost useless without a neck. Lacerda needs a neck.

Necks are fairly simple to make.

Then again, so are free throws, at least in design. It’s the execution that gets you.

To put it differently, it’s not hard to do right. It’s just real easy to do wrong.

Lacerda is using ‘bolt on’ construction, which means the neck is bolted (or screwed) onto the body. That’s why you need a neck pocket; its the place the neck sits.

I decided to use this method for a number of reasons.

One, I wanted to use up a lot of leftover parts and stuff I had laying around. Among those things are a number of neck ferrules and neck screws.

Two, I have a template for the neck pocket, which makes it easy to rout one quickly and correctly.

Three, given the nature of the entire building process, bolt-on construction leaves the most room for adjustment and modification should an error occur.

But there’s a problem. I didn’t have a template to make the neck. It’s not hard to cut out a neck, but as I get older, and theoretically wiser, I want to do things quickly, easily, and repeatably.

The best way to do this is a template. I could have bought one, but then I’d have to wait for a long time for it to be sent here.

Patience is not my strong point.

So how then do I make a template of a guitar neck?

With a guitar neck, maybe?

I just happened to have one in my shop. It is from one of my Warmoth guitars and is made to fit into the pockets created by the neck pocket template.

These necks are drilled for the traditional 4-bolt plates:

Which is not what Lacerda uses, but that’s not really a problem.

I took a piece of Plexiglas that I had and carefully marked out the holes for the neck plate. I did this because I need to anchor the neck to the Plexiglas when I cut the template.

So I drilled four holes and countersunk them on the ‘traditional’ side (explanation to follow).

This allowed me to screw the Plexiglas to the neck in a very secure fashion. I drew a line around the neck onto the Plexiglas’ paper covering and removed the neck.

I did that so I could cut the shape (leaving a little extra) with a jigsaw. No sense making the router work any harder than it has to.

I re-attached the neck, used a flush-cut router bit, and soon enough I had a template of a Stratocaster neck.

Here’s a slightly better image that makes the template more visible:

***************I drilled small holes where the tuners go so that I can transfer the spacing to the real neck:*

Lacerda will have what is called a reverse headstock; on normal Stratocasters or other ’6 in line’ headstocks, the tuners were originally on the top.

But after the popularity of Jimi Hendrix, who played a right-handed Stratocaster upside down, as well as the customizing craze of the 1980s, reverse headstocks became pretty common too.

Here’s a photo for comparison. Traditional on top, reverse on the bottom (sorry the headstocks aren’t the same size):

So using the template, I chose a piece of mahogany that was very straight and not twisted.

But wait! There’s something else that needs doing.

Most necks have a truss rod to counteract the strings pulling on the neck. Wood is strong, but it is flexible, and strings can exert a lot of energy. They can bend a neck a significant amount, to where the strings are high off the fretboard and you can’t even play the guitar. The truss rod’s job is to counter that energy. The truss rod is built into the wood of the neck,beneath the fretboard, and you turn it with a wrench to add or subtract tension.

The truss rod must be very accurately placed and installed, because it has an important job to do.

I needed another template. I had been meaning to build one of these for some time, so I finally did it. I use a small ‘laminate’ or trim router to cut the truss rod channel. It needs to be straight and a specific length.

I took more Plexiglas and added ‘rails on either side as well as pieces at the end, These were all measured to account for he size of the router base as well as the size of the router bit. What I ended up with was a jig that allows me to rout the truss rod channel very easily and quickly, but more importantly very accurately.

I marked a center line on the mahogany and used the neck template to draw out the shape I would cut. Using those lines, I could finalize the position of the truss rod and set the truss rod jig where I needed it.

Two minutes later, I had the truss rod channel all routed:

You can see where I marked the tuner holes and partially cut out the headstock. Lacerda will not have a strat-style headstock; it will be more streamlined, in keeping with the design.

I didn’t take too many other photos of the building process. I installed ‘face dots’ on the front of the fretboard and ‘side dots’ on the side. But I used the same size dots for both; I wanted a very small, unobtrusive marker for the face.

I finished shaping the outline of the neck with the neck template and some other tools, making sure that the neck fit the neck pocket snugly. It did; the templates make a big difference!

Then I glued the fretboard to the neck. Which I forgot that I didn’t want to do!

I prefer to install the frets on the fretboard before installing the fretboard on the neck. That way I can be sure that the frets are’t making the fretboard, and the neck, have a ‘back bow’, which makes the strings too low.

Well, it didn’t happen that way this time. I used a flush cut bit to trim the fretboard to the neck, then installed the frets.

Then I leveled, crowned, and polished them.

Coming up next: We’ll see photos of the finished guitar!!! There are more things to explain, but since I didn’t take photos of them during the process, we’ll just have to see them after the fact…