Ok, in an earlier post we got the guitar body ready to fit all the components. Because I decided to highly customize my guitar, I had to do some work that you wouldn’t have to do when you build your own guitar. What we’re going to take a look at today is working on the neck. The neck comes with what is known as a paddle headstock. That means it’s blank and ready for you to cut into shape. The typical way would be a scroll saw, but I don’t have one. I tried a hand coping saw but the blade broke and I didn’t have another. So I decided to use a jig saw. The only problem is that the blade is too wide and I couldn’t get into the tight curves I needed. So I hacked it into shape then use a four in hand, which is basically a wood file or rasp with four cutting surfaces, two flat, and two curved.

Rough Cut Guitar Head

So after all the hacking and chopping I ended up with this ugly guitar neck.  I don’t suggest you do it this way, but it works if you don’t have the tool you needed.  With all the tools I do have, it’s shocking I don’t have something to cut such tight curves.  If you want straight lines cut, I’ve got it though.  So after some shaping with the wood file I got it down to looking like a telecaster neck.  I think I took a little too much away where the neck meets the head, it’s not structurally bad, it doesn’t look exactly like a tele neck - if you look close.  If you remember I got a new bridge for this guitar kit.  The new bridge was a stock telecaster bridge - which meant it was thinner.  Yes the guitar kit bridge was beefier than a stock one.  So that might seem like it’s not too much of a problem, but I found that it affected string height.  So much so that I couldn’t use the height adjustment.  When they were as high as they go the strings were still too low.  So now I was faced with the prospect of raising the bridge with a shim, shaving some off of the neck heel, or routing out the neck pocket.

With this file for shaping wood, and a little elbow grease you get...

A telecaster headstock

Option 1 was the easiest but would look the worst so tune in next time to see whether or not I used option 2 or 3.  Neither option was what I wanted to do, but that’s the danger of customizing a kit.  If you do yours stock you won’t have to put up with all this stuff, but I wanted to show you how I did some things.