Good morning,

It is just possible that I may now have enough walnut and African mahogany neck blanks to last me the rest of my life!!

The European walnut started out as a 100mm thick x 650mm wide by 2300mm long rough sawn sawn plank. Now there aren’t many uses for a chain saw in guitar making but making this lump of timber (and some others) fit in my car is certainly one of them!

Back at the workshop the cut lengths then had a panel of thick laminate screwed to one side so that they could be held on the vacuum bed of my CNC router and then they were skimmed to make them flat. They were then flipped and skimmed again on the other side. Cutting the slabs into neck blanks took a while as it involved many changes of table angle on the bandsaw as the boards weren’t perfectly quarter sawn themselves. The blanks were then cleaned up through the belt sander.

I ended up with 19 very close to quarter sawn blanks in addition to the other 11 two-piece blanks which I glued up recently. Should keep me busy for a while!!!!

I also bought a large plank English ash and a smaller piece of zebrano to use for electric bodies. I cut one body length section of zebrano into four to give two pairs of book matched cappings. Not sure what to use as the core. Maybe American walnut or maple.

Cheers

Darren