How to Make the Neck Joint

 

To make this joint, glue the bent sides together with the head block and tail block. Then cut a straight-sided mortise into the head block. Do this before attaching the top and bottom plates. I place the headblock in a machinist’s vice and use a template guided router, but hand tools would work just as well.

Then assemble the neck blank. It must have the heel block attached and be absolutely straight and flat on both sides. Measure the mortise width and cut a tenon dead center in the heel block to match it. I use a tenoning jig on the table saw. Notice that both the mortise and the tenon have no top or bottom; they are cut through the entire height of both the body and the heel block. Now comes the tricky part - the tenon shoulders. These have to be angled back to make the knife edges as explained. This is achieved by tilting the table saw blade. Study your plans to find a tilt angle that allows the tenon edges to hit the body but lets the rest of the inside of the shoulder surface clear the body.

The shoulders are cut on the table saw using a very accurate miter gauge. If we ran the heel block straight through, we would have a 0 degree neck backset; that is, the fretboard would line up parallel with a line perpendicular to the side of the body - i.e. parallel to a flat top (the top is in fact not flat, but we’ll ignore that for the moment.)

We want to pull the far end of the neck down with respect to the body to give us a backset angle. So in addition to tilting the blade, we need to set the miter gauge to give us this back set angle.

I have found that setting this angle to slightly less than one degree gives good results (one of my sources recommends .8 degrees). But bear in might that I use mahogany or cherry for necks. For a stiffer wood, such as maple, I speculate you would want slightly less of an angle. But clearly, we are talking about angle accuracies and adjustments of fractions of a degree, which is why I specified a really accurate miter gauge.

Attach the Neck

 

Once the tenon is made, insert the neck into the body. Set it up and temporarily clamp it so that the top of the neck (no fingerboard is attached at this point) is exactly at the level of the top of the body, plus whatever the finished thickness of the soundboard will be. You want the top surface of the neck (which will also be the bottom surface of the fingerboard) and the sound board to line up exactly. Now drill from inside the body through the headblock and into the tenon to a depth determined by your diagram. Now pull the neck off.  Put a drill or dowel in your freshly drilled holes into the neck tenon to serve as a guide to where these holes are inside the tenon.  Mark the path of these holes on the tenon sides. These marks will guide you to drill holes for the barrels which, as you recall, are at right angles to the bolts holes and must intersect them. Barrel bolt bolts are 10 mm in diameter, so you will need a 10 mm drill.

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