New Guitar Project: Les Paul Junior Build – Part Two

So now the body blank was ready to be routed.

I made a template for the neck pocket, or, if we want to use the correct woodworking term, mortise. I used 1/2″ plywood that I found next to the dumpster.

I needed it to be 2 1/4″ wide with a square end. I didn’t need the corners to be sharp because the router bit is round.

Once it was done, it was ready to use:

 As usual, I applied some common tricks to help ease the workload. A forstner bit is used to ‘hog out’ as much of the wood as possible so that the router can work more easily.

It’s capable of working harder, but why waste the energy (and router bit sharpness) when you don’t have to?

I used a template and a flush-cut bit in the router:

I routed out the neck mortise, and it looks much cleaner:

Here’s the view from the front. You can see the rabbets on the face clearly, as well as a partial view of the roundover on the back side of the front edge of the neck mortise (wow, that’s an ugly sentence).

I also needed to cut the mortise on an angle. I didn’t get any photos of that part, but all it entailed was putting a small strip of wood under the back end of the template until I got the angle right.

Hardly revolutionary.

But it was effective: 

I needed 4 degrees of pitch because the bridge on this guitar sits rather high off the face of the guitar. I achieved this goal: 

Now that I’ve got the mortise finished, I can start cutting the outline of the body.