covered the truss rod with pieces of wood and sanded the surfaces smooth

Then carved the dove joint and recess for the neck extension

Due to the truss rod being a tad long, I hade to adjust the recess for the neck extension.  Only way to avoid that is to custom make a truss rod instead of purchasing the smallest available to me.

Next will be gluing on the wings at the machine head, followed by planing the head and neck to the correct thickness.

Next step will be to box in the truss rod with bits & pieces of mahognony wood.

Keep us posted Peter. I'm keen to have a go at this. 

🙂🙏🎶🎸

Good luck with the first build!

After some research I decided on a Benedetto Archtop for several reasons:

1) plans and templates are easily available

2) very good book describing how to build such a guitar

3) gives me the most with regards to skills I need to develop so I can make some Baroque and Renaiscance stringed instruments.

Got all my wood together: spruce for soundboard and tone bars, maple for backboard, sides and neck (which will be sandwitched maple/mahogony/maple so I can get the most out of the bits of wood I have).  There will be some purfling skills (black/whitw/black maple) as well as mahogony binding with black/white strips.

As I am slowly building up the required hardwire to manufacture this I used the local Men's shed to start the build (they have a lot of woodworking machinery that I can easily use) to start building the neck.  After cutting a board of Maple to the required thickness I marked and cut out the basic shape of the neck.