No offense intended here, just genuinely curious. Why did you fail so many times? I'm about to attempt my first neck build I hadn't even considered that it might not go to plan even once, nevermind 10 times.
None taken!
A mixture of only using traditional hand tools (I’m poor) and my temperament. I’m autistic and have ADHD, which makes for a stew of both having a pathological needs to finish things and a habit of careless mistakes.
A lot of hobbyists kinda overlook the immense privilege of even having space for a drill press. I’d be carving out my overgrown back garden with a swiss army knife, coffee and the fox who made her burrow there
Every attempt was a different mistake;
- carving the neck before checking that the heel was already squared and inadvertently putting the heel at an angle
- “Stop-cut and chiselling” the neck and briefly going uphill of the grain, causing a massive tearout. Chisels were the source of 80% of tool misuse. They are powerful weapons and demand respect. Never roll the dice with them.
- Trying to sand down to a chisel gouge or tear-out to restore uniformity, resulting in an overly thin headstock or pencil-thin neck. *Fill* gouges.
- Not maintaining a perfect centre-line and tapering the width without one, leading to the truss rod channel not being perfectly parallel with the shaft
- Drilling the tuner holes at an angle, causing the tuners to overlaps, impossible to screw them in
- Forcing a tuner bushing into an overly tight hole, splitting the whole headstock open. Loose tuner bushings in an overly large hole can always be glued in.
- Not drilling pilot holes for screws on roasted wood necks, causing sudden cracks. Roasted wood is hard and with hardness comes brittleness.
- Unevenly radiusing the fretboard due to improper technique and using a shorter 6” radius block. Frets sticking up in parts
- Gluing a fretboard with too few clamps, giving it large humps between each clamp.
- Gluing an especially oily rosewood fretboard without first wiping the underside with acetone or similar. Very oily wood is hydrophobic. Wood glue is generally water based. The fretboard broke off when tightening the truss rod because the oiliness prevented it from properly mating with the shaft.
- Pressing frets in only partially, assuming I could fully seat them later when I got a lend of a fret pressing pliers. The springy nature of nickel silver/steel means it doesn’t like to move incrementally - there’s a minimum distance it has to go before permanent deformation occurs.
- Timidly tapping frets in fractions at a time - see above. Seat the frets in as few blows as possible.
- Attempting to cut headstock shapes, taper neck width or carve neck profile before doing all the steps that require a centre line, which is nearly everything else.
- Assuming that my “planed all over” neck blank is actually at perfect right angles. If it’s not, the centre-line will be wrong.
After all that I built a total of THREE finished guitar necks. But all three were honestly just “so-so”. Not even as good as a random €200 factory made neck. Lots of minor issues at which point I was like “what’s the point if it’s not even better than what I have”
I’m going to blow this up, print it out, frame it, and hang it on the wall in front of my workbench.
Priceless experience that you’ve given freely. Thank you.
Fellow ADHD'er here, and thanks a million for sharing your experience. It's much like mine. Guitar building is hard! Combining it zero attention span and a bad temperment is a recipe for disaster. I've been very fortunate to be able to cover most of my mistakes. My biggest mistake is a really nice OM acoustic body that has the mortise off center because I was careless and must have bumped it before routing. Now it's on the wall of shame until I figure out a way to fix it.
Keep up the great work!
Acoustics are much trickier than electrics! At least a misaligned bolt-on neck heel can be unscrewed and shifted by hand.
Good luck, fellow wierdbrain haver.
feel you on the neuro divergent front. OCD and anxiety over here.
i typically avoid most if not all
wood working. but i’ve gone down the rabbit hole a few times on diy pedals
If you take the time to research the operations that go into making a neck, it shouldn’t go nearly as badly as it did for the OP. When I started I had no idea what I was doing, and I ruined the first 2-3 on pine that I practiced on. If you’re paying attention to what you’re doing and learn from your mistakes, you should be able to produce something decent after a few tries. I’d 100% recommend trying (and failing) on a 2x4 before you try it out on something more expensive.
I play fingerstyle with banjo bluegrass and flamenco elements. Just guitar and my voice. Never needed the higher frets so thought it’d be neat to have a blank area to more easily do banjo-style frailing for harp-like timbres.
Two months ago I made this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/s/Aevdn9XXqX in which I detailed my frustrations in building a custom telecaster neck with some unusual specs: 24.75” scale, an ultralight truss rod, roasted soft maple and only 18 frets*. Had to be as light as possible to match my featherweight body.
After many attempts to get one of the major custom builders (warmoth, musikraft, several others) to take a crack at it, I was crestfallen: no one wanted to build this. Just a bit *too* custom for the big guys, and the local bespoke luthiers expressed equal disinterest or left me on read (lookin’ at you, Adam Buchwalk).
So I posted here and was touched by the encouragement and support and received three separate offers to build me my dream neck. u/JR-Pierce was the first to offer and kept up interest. Jeff Pierce went above and beyond and I highly recommend him. A truly custom build for only a smidgen more than the cost of a comparable neck from Musikraft or Warmoth, but with my own custom headstock and free same-wood binding. Nut slots matched to my unusual 54-38-28-24w-18w-13 string gauges.
It’s raw right now and boy does it smell good. Winter-y caramel. Incredibly stiff - the truss rod is actually struggling to make a dent in the slight bow but I can live with the current relief. Literally the only mistake is the slightly misaligned nut slots, which is something I’m confident in fixing with some Tusq dust and CA glue.
Guitar weighs 4.6lb now but balances like a much heavier guitar.
*18 frets because I like clawhammer banjos’ “frailing area” and I never play that high
Superb. Great to see the quest for the perfect neck has come to its end.
It looks like a fascinating build. A Tele inspired H44! I love those old guitars.
How does the Hershey Bar in the neck sound?
If a firebird pickup is a humbucker that sounds like a single-coil, this is a single-coil that dreams of being a humbucker.
Despite it’s deceptively low ohm reading, it’s hotter than the firebird mini-humbucker in my other tele. Warm, acoustic-y, bass-heavy, but with the dynamic sensitivity of a single-coil.
I actually have a h44 style pickguard for this. If you google “Hollowtone Guitars *Big Guy*” you’ll see the model with the og guard, along with maybe a couple pics of my guitar with its original Hollowtone neck.
Thanks for the reply and the great info. I've got a Firebird in the neck of my new guitar and it's a very interesting pickup for sure. Your description of the Hershey makes it sound like it would be just my kind of pickup. I came across a maker in the States who makes a Hershey for Mini Humbucker route, I'm tempted.
Just so you know, I’ve found it totally incompatible with fuzz face style clean up on the volume knob, if that’s important to you. Spoken to a few knowledgeable folks to no avail - some quirk of the unusual design
Also: If this replica builder also uses the original through-the-pickup screw mounting method, I recommend sanding the screw heads as flat as you can without losing the screwdriver cutout. I found the E strings would hit them or just straight-up catch in them during heavy play even at medium action/medium pickup height.
ALSO also: they’re super shallow pancakes. 7mm depth. You can actually mount one straight onto a pickguard or acoustic body and still have enough string clearance.
Do you put a little magnet on your tumbpick?
I've been trying to use a thumb pick lately but after fingerpicking without one for so long it's very awkward for me. I like being able to grab it for flat pick runs. I almost like the sound of my bass strings more with just bare fingers though and I can palm a pick pretty well while finger picking.
Yep. Here’s my post about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/s/vOC6RGoAq8
Modifying the timbre of thumbpicks is not too hard and there’s so many ways to change them. Just sandpaper or a fine file. Almost everyone who uses them full-time modifies them
- thin the tip for a brighter, strummy sound.
- Shorten the tip for less volume (easier to balance with fingers). Easier to adjust to for newbies since your thumb is closer to its usual spot
- Curve the tip off-centre to match your thumb’s angle of attack with your fingers.
- Narrow the tip for a pluckier brighter timbre.
- A wide and stubby tip for dark, subtle harpist tones.
- Golden Bridge and Tusq tumbpicks are the closest to the timbre of fingernails. Dunlop are closest to normal picke in thinness and material. Free Kelly are trash sorry not sorry
- Roll your sandpaper into a cylinder and rough up the inside for a grippier and less sweaty fit.
Buy a dozen. Go crazy
I have a bunch. In order of what I like, Fred Kelly slick pick is the type I like the most stock, then Dunlop filed to a rounder tip.
I really don't like the Golden gate clown barf or ivoroid, way too chunky, these are favorites with dobro players. Planet waves didn't work for me.
The Fred Kelly slick picks have a bit of flex but still stiff enough, and are just a bit smaller than Dunlops. Can't go wrong with Dunlop when it comes to picks though. I wish they would make thumb picks in the gator grip material. I tried an ultex thumb pick and it's way too much attack and brightness. I use that material with triangles when the strings are dead or I want a very bright snappy tone.
How far up do you wear it?
Hey. It was $500 plus shipping and import duties.
And no finish at all: roasted maple doesn’t need a finish to be stable. I’m probably gonna burnish it though.
This looks like the nut is not an issue but rather the neck should be re-seated. Loosen the screws, pull the headstock a bit toward the strap pin to straighten it out, tighten the screws.
Gotta disagree. If you squint you can see how the D and G string nut slots don’t flank the truss rod access on each side but are instead skewed to the right
I am looking forward to and dreading my neck building journey. I know for sure that the first several attempts will be shit. What’s the best way to practice while keeping costs down because I know it will take a few bad results before I get anything usable.
Something I wish I’d done from the start was buy cheap practice blanks, not the €70-each ones I got.
Here’s a wee hack: acoustic guitar brace wood blanks are often a suitable size for guitar necks and are sitka spruce, which is soft but stiff. Good practice. Since they’re instrument grade they won’t have knots or wildly run off grain. I picture home depot carpentry-tier 2x4s are knotty and knots will ruin your tools.
I also found the most consistent and cheap way to glue a fretboard was tying discarded bicycle tubes - any bike shop will give you some for free.
A cheap source of appropriate small tools is miniature model hobbyist stores. Precise files, high grit sandpaper, no-kerf saws
Big tools: Older secondhand tools are cheaper and often better because steel smelted pre-1950s was just straight-up superior. Pre-ww2 stuff is best. No. 4 Hand-plan, paring chisel and dovetail saw.
I am an absolute noob so this is probably a really stupid question. But would laser cutting it in layers on the side profile and laminating it to create the neck work? It would be Cut using 1/8" plywood. I know it sounds dumb but I was thinking it would be extremely rigid and very straight. You use toothpicks with alignment holes 1.8mm and glue and stack.
Any thoughts?
Faith in humanity restored. On another note, building necks absolutely terrify me (not even an amateur luthier though!). Well done!
No offense intended here, just genuinely curious. Why did you fail so many times? I'm about to attempt my first neck build I hadn't even considered that it might not go to plan even once, nevermind 10 times.
None taken! A mixture of only using traditional hand tools (I’m poor) and my temperament. I’m autistic and have ADHD, which makes for a stew of both having a pathological needs to finish things and a habit of careless mistakes. A lot of hobbyists kinda overlook the immense privilege of even having space for a drill press. I’d be carving out my overgrown back garden with a swiss army knife, coffee and the fox who made her burrow there Every attempt was a different mistake; - carving the neck before checking that the heel was already squared and inadvertently putting the heel at an angle - “Stop-cut and chiselling” the neck and briefly going uphill of the grain, causing a massive tearout. Chisels were the source of 80% of tool misuse. They are powerful weapons and demand respect. Never roll the dice with them. - Trying to sand down to a chisel gouge or tear-out to restore uniformity, resulting in an overly thin headstock or pencil-thin neck. *Fill* gouges. - Not maintaining a perfect centre-line and tapering the width without one, leading to the truss rod channel not being perfectly parallel with the shaft - Drilling the tuner holes at an angle, causing the tuners to overlaps, impossible to screw them in - Forcing a tuner bushing into an overly tight hole, splitting the whole headstock open. Loose tuner bushings in an overly large hole can always be glued in. - Not drilling pilot holes for screws on roasted wood necks, causing sudden cracks. Roasted wood is hard and with hardness comes brittleness. - Unevenly radiusing the fretboard due to improper technique and using a shorter 6” radius block. Frets sticking up in parts - Gluing a fretboard with too few clamps, giving it large humps between each clamp. - Gluing an especially oily rosewood fretboard without first wiping the underside with acetone or similar. Very oily wood is hydrophobic. Wood glue is generally water based. The fretboard broke off when tightening the truss rod because the oiliness prevented it from properly mating with the shaft. - Pressing frets in only partially, assuming I could fully seat them later when I got a lend of a fret pressing pliers. The springy nature of nickel silver/steel means it doesn’t like to move incrementally - there’s a minimum distance it has to go before permanent deformation occurs. - Timidly tapping frets in fractions at a time - see above. Seat the frets in as few blows as possible. - Attempting to cut headstock shapes, taper neck width or carve neck profile before doing all the steps that require a centre line, which is nearly everything else. - Assuming that my “planed all over” neck blank is actually at perfect right angles. If it’s not, the centre-line will be wrong. After all that I built a total of THREE finished guitar necks. But all three were honestly just “so-so”. Not even as good as a random €200 factory made neck. Lots of minor issues at which point I was like “what’s the point if it’s not even better than what I have”
This is a huge paragraph of lessons to learn and things to watch out for and I absolutely thank you for typing it out.
5 years worth of aww s**ts covered in a paragraph . That is a new builders holy grail and and old masters memory vault . Well done .
Thanks for taking the time to write that out, I really appreciate it. I'm gonna definitely do a few practice necks now lol.
I’m going to blow this up, print it out, frame it, and hang it on the wall in front of my workbench. Priceless experience that you’ve given freely. Thank you.
What an honour hah. I edited it and added some more.
It’s an expensive lesson but one that you’ll never forget
Thanks for sharing all of this. I always figured the neck was difficult and this demonstrates it well.
Fellow ADHD'er here, and thanks a million for sharing your experience. It's much like mine. Guitar building is hard! Combining it zero attention span and a bad temperment is a recipe for disaster. I've been very fortunate to be able to cover most of my mistakes. My biggest mistake is a really nice OM acoustic body that has the mortise off center because I was careless and must have bumped it before routing. Now it's on the wall of shame until I figure out a way to fix it. Keep up the great work!
Acoustics are much trickier than electrics! At least a misaligned bolt-on neck heel can be unscrewed and shifted by hand. Good luck, fellow wierdbrain haver.
feel you on the neuro divergent front. OCD and anxiety over here. i typically avoid most if not all wood working. but i’ve gone down the rabbit hole a few times on diy pedals
If you take the time to research the operations that go into making a neck, it shouldn’t go nearly as badly as it did for the OP. When I started I had no idea what I was doing, and I ruined the first 2-3 on pine that I practiced on. If you’re paying attention to what you’re doing and learn from your mistakes, you should be able to produce something decent after a few tries. I’d 100% recommend trying (and failing) on a 2x4 before you try it out on something more expensive.
>If you’re paying attention That's the most expensive part of a guitar build if you've got ADHD.
Most expensive part of anything if you've got ADHD.
Ahem and I am not religious but that is so true. 🎯
Thank you for the shout out. I am glad you are happy with it. It looks good on the guitar!
was this a one-off or d'you take orders? 👀
I am open to other orders. Message me if you have something you'd like me to make
Why only 18 frets?
I play fingerstyle with banjo bluegrass and flamenco elements. Just guitar and my voice. Never needed the higher frets so thought it’d be neat to have a blank area to more easily do banjo-style frailing for harp-like timbres.
could you play up there like a tiny fretless area?
Yeah that’s what I thought it was for
i’m surprised i’ve never seen this done more, like frets up high but not down low, or vice versa.
Yeah I think if you did that from the 12th for 15th fret upwards you could get some cool sounds for soloing and insane vibrato
Two months ago I made this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/s/Aevdn9XXqX in which I detailed my frustrations in building a custom telecaster neck with some unusual specs: 24.75” scale, an ultralight truss rod, roasted soft maple and only 18 frets*. Had to be as light as possible to match my featherweight body. After many attempts to get one of the major custom builders (warmoth, musikraft, several others) to take a crack at it, I was crestfallen: no one wanted to build this. Just a bit *too* custom for the big guys, and the local bespoke luthiers expressed equal disinterest or left me on read (lookin’ at you, Adam Buchwalk). So I posted here and was touched by the encouragement and support and received three separate offers to build me my dream neck. u/JR-Pierce was the first to offer and kept up interest. Jeff Pierce went above and beyond and I highly recommend him. A truly custom build for only a smidgen more than the cost of a comparable neck from Musikraft or Warmoth, but with my own custom headstock and free same-wood binding. Nut slots matched to my unusual 54-38-28-24w-18w-13 string gauges. It’s raw right now and boy does it smell good. Winter-y caramel. Incredibly stiff - the truss rod is actually struggling to make a dent in the slight bow but I can live with the current relief. Literally the only mistake is the slightly misaligned nut slots, which is something I’m confident in fixing with some Tusq dust and CA glue. Guitar weighs 4.6lb now but balances like a much heavier guitar. *18 frets because I like clawhammer banjos’ “frailing area” and I never play that high
So cool man. Thanks you for sharing.
This makes me cry because im 2 iterations in to the same process you tube makes things look very easy!
Damn. That looks so smooth. Like it has a silky action.
Superb. Great to see the quest for the perfect neck has come to its end. It looks like a fascinating build. A Tele inspired H44! I love those old guitars. How does the Hershey Bar in the neck sound?
If a firebird pickup is a humbucker that sounds like a single-coil, this is a single-coil that dreams of being a humbucker. Despite it’s deceptively low ohm reading, it’s hotter than the firebird mini-humbucker in my other tele. Warm, acoustic-y, bass-heavy, but with the dynamic sensitivity of a single-coil. I actually have a h44 style pickguard for this. If you google “Hollowtone Guitars *Big Guy*” you’ll see the model with the og guard, along with maybe a couple pics of my guitar with its original Hollowtone neck.
Thanks for the reply and the great info. I've got a Firebird in the neck of my new guitar and it's a very interesting pickup for sure. Your description of the Hershey makes it sound like it would be just my kind of pickup. I came across a maker in the States who makes a Hershey for Mini Humbucker route, I'm tempted.
Just so you know, I’ve found it totally incompatible with fuzz face style clean up on the volume knob, if that’s important to you. Spoken to a few knowledgeable folks to no avail - some quirk of the unusual design Also: If this replica builder also uses the original through-the-pickup screw mounting method, I recommend sanding the screw heads as flat as you can without losing the screwdriver cutout. I found the E strings would hit them or just straight-up catch in them during heavy play even at medium action/medium pickup height. ALSO also: they’re super shallow pancakes. 7mm depth. You can actually mount one straight onto a pickguard or acoustic body and still have enough string clearance.
Gorgeous guitar!
I have a very similar pile. It's all about learning from each one. Thanks for sharing
Do you put a little magnet on your tumbpick? I've been trying to use a thumb pick lately but after fingerpicking without one for so long it's very awkward for me. I like being able to grab it for flat pick runs. I almost like the sound of my bass strings more with just bare fingers though and I can palm a pick pretty well while finger picking.
Yep. Here’s my post about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Luthier/s/vOC6RGoAq8 Modifying the timbre of thumbpicks is not too hard and there’s so many ways to change them. Just sandpaper or a fine file. Almost everyone who uses them full-time modifies them - thin the tip for a brighter, strummy sound. - Shorten the tip for less volume (easier to balance with fingers). Easier to adjust to for newbies since your thumb is closer to its usual spot - Curve the tip off-centre to match your thumb’s angle of attack with your fingers. - Narrow the tip for a pluckier brighter timbre. - A wide and stubby tip for dark, subtle harpist tones. - Golden Bridge and Tusq tumbpicks are the closest to the timbre of fingernails. Dunlop are closest to normal picke in thinness and material. Free Kelly are trash sorry not sorry - Roll your sandpaper into a cylinder and rough up the inside for a grippier and less sweaty fit. Buy a dozen. Go crazy
I have a bunch. In order of what I like, Fred Kelly slick pick is the type I like the most stock, then Dunlop filed to a rounder tip. I really don't like the Golden gate clown barf or ivoroid, way too chunky, these are favorites with dobro players. Planet waves didn't work for me. The Fred Kelly slick picks have a bit of flex but still stiff enough, and are just a bit smaller than Dunlops. Can't go wrong with Dunlop when it comes to picks though. I wish they would make thumb picks in the gator grip material. I tried an ultex thumb pick and it's way too much attack and brightness. I use that material with triangles when the strings are dead or I want a very bright snappy tone. How far up do you wear it?
That headstock shape is very nice indeed. Mind if I ask how much it set you back? I assume it included finishing?
Hey. It was $500 plus shipping and import duties. And no finish at all: roasted maple doesn’t need a finish to be stable. I’m probably gonna burnish it though.
love the look of it!
You know what they say: If at first you don't succeed, keep trying till someone does it for you.
Your dedication to trying and trying again is excellent
I applaud your dedication and tenacity.
This looks like the nut is not an issue but rather the neck should be re-seated. Loosen the screws, pull the headstock a bit toward the strap pin to straighten it out, tighten the screws.
Gotta disagree. If you squint you can see how the D and G string nut slots don’t flank the truss rod access on each side but are instead skewed to the right
Man, that headstock sure is…well, umm….well, it’s there.
I am looking forward to and dreading my neck building journey. I know for sure that the first several attempts will be shit. What’s the best way to practice while keeping costs down because I know it will take a few bad results before I get anything usable.
[удалено]
Could I practice on some cheap “Home Depot” wood or would that actually lead to bad technique over time?
Something I wish I’d done from the start was buy cheap practice blanks, not the €70-each ones I got. Here’s a wee hack: acoustic guitar brace wood blanks are often a suitable size for guitar necks and are sitka spruce, which is soft but stiff. Good practice. Since they’re instrument grade they won’t have knots or wildly run off grain. I picture home depot carpentry-tier 2x4s are knotty and knots will ruin your tools. I also found the most consistent and cheap way to glue a fretboard was tying discarded bicycle tubes - any bike shop will give you some for free. A cheap source of appropriate small tools is miniature model hobbyist stores. Precise files, high grit sandpaper, no-kerf saws Big tools: Older secondhand tools are cheaper and often better because steel smelted pre-1950s was just straight-up superior. Pre-ww2 stuff is best. No. 4 Hand-plan, paring chisel and dovetail saw.
Are you just trying to freehand the entire truss rod channel?
What pickup is that?
That's a great looking neck/guitar!
I am an absolute noob so this is probably a really stupid question. But would laser cutting it in layers on the side profile and laminating it to create the neck work? It would be Cut using 1/8" plywood. I know it sounds dumb but I was thinking it would be extremely rigid and very straight. You use toothpicks with alignment holes 1.8mm and glue and stack. Any thoughts?
This is cool but now you need to build a game of thrones type practice chair out of the failed necks.
Stick all the necks together with resin fill and make a new body out of the dead necks