Making An Electric Guitar from Oak (part 2 of 9)

In this video I began by drilling the holes for the tuners to fit in to the headstock.  I did lots of careful measuring to check that the tuners were eventy spaced out and level with the string slots of the nut.  I first drilled some pilot holes with a 2mm drill bit on the drill press, and then I drilled the holes to their final size. 

The heatstock wasn’t quite wide enough, so I glued on another strip of oak to it.  Once the glue had dried, I could then shape the headstock on the bandsaw and belt sander.

I like the shape of the Fender jumbo headstocks, so I opted for a shape similar to that, but I didn’t follow any templates so it retained an “original” appearance.

I then did a bit of shaping to the end of the neck that would fit in to the guitar’s body.

That was the neck basically done, so next I started working on the fretboard.  I used a piece of Sapele which was left over from the ukulele build. The workpiece wasn’t quite wide enough so after jointing and thickness planning the material to the desired thickness, I needed to laminate two pieces together.

Once the glue had dried, I thickness planed it once again to clean it up. 

I had already bought some fretwire on eBay, and I then needed to radius the neck to match the curve of the fretwire.  To do this, I made my own radius block, by cutting some thin, bevelled pieces of wood and attaching them to a thicker piece of wood.  I then hot glued some sandpaper to it (beginning with 80 grit).  I soon found that the 80 grit paper wasn’t aggressive enough to shape the fretboard, so I switched to 40 grit which made the process much quicker.

I kept making marks along the fretboard with a sharpie marker pen as a reference so that I could check where I was removing material from.

Eventually, the shape of the neck matched the curve of the fretwire pretty well – certainly good enough for me anyway.