Saturday, July 24, 2004. . . .

Well, I took off a few days from working on the guitar, for a couple of reasons. The primary reason was that I thought I should take care of putting my vacation trip photos on my website, while everything was still fresh in my mind. That took a couple of days.

Also, to be honest, the second reason was that I was somewhat deliberately postponing working on the next step --- setting and sanding the neck angle --- because that always makes me super-nervous. I hate those steps in guitarmaking where it is a pretty critical procedure, and if you mess up, you've lost all the work you did on that piece up to that point! (In other words, I would hate to have to remake my neck!)

I kept changing my mind, too, on what order I wanted to do the various steps --- whether to sand the neck angle first, then shape the heel, or to do it the other way around, for example. I decided to sand the angle first, as having the bigger heel area might make it easier to handle (clamping, for example) when I have to drill the holes for the two threaded inserts in the heel.

To the right is how I sanded the neck angle (of course, I'm holding the neck solidly to the table with both hands when I actually sand it!). On my first try, I ended up sanding too much of a back-set in the heel (even though I thought I had set the sander table up at the proper angle), so I had to readjust it and resand it. The second time it came out just right. I ended up having about a 1-degree neck angle.