Handcrafting a Classical Guitar Neck, Taos, New Mexico

Machine cuts can distract us and for some it becomes lifelong to use machines only. Those advocating them as the better path influence others on a major scale and so then the path in life we’ve chosen for ourselves gets distorted. Even now, after over a half century of daily furniture making, someone out there, someone who just doesn’t get it, who cannot get it and may never get it, tries to persuade me that machines are the better choice. 

Paul Sellers, woodworker

When I was a real little kid, like four years old, my dad built a small shed in the backyard of the house, and my parents were a little slow in putting shingles on the roof. One day I decided that I would finish the work myself, because I had watched mom and dad nail the shingles onto the skip sheathing, and in my mind that meant I know what to do. With hammer in hand and my own nail bag full of nails I crawled up on the roof and started swatting nails into those lovely thin pieces of sugar pine. This banging brought my parents out of the house, and when they saw what I was doing, I was ordered to climb down and surrender hammer and nails. I was then scolded about being on the roof by myself, and that I was putting on the shingles all wrong!  One doesn’t shingle a roof by starting at the ridge beam! I presented a strong argument as to why that method would work, but my speech was cut short and I was ordered to my room. This was the beginning of my love affair with hand tools.

I did become a professional carpenter when I was thirty five years old, I was out of work and had just moved in with my girlfriend (we celebrated our twenty sixth wedding anniversary this year!) and the only decent work available at the time was construction. It was hard work that I took pride in and I eventually bought over five thousand dollars worth of power tools that I used as a framing and finish carpenter, some of those power tools are in the workshop. I bought these tools at the time I was getting serious about becoming a full time guitar maker and I made it a habit NOT to use those tools to build guitars. Speed, power and noise don’t always equal efficiency, and I didn’t have the workshop space to have a bunch of stationary power tools.

The studio workshop I occupy is just under 130 square feet in size. Hand tools are the practical solution, though I do own several routers that I use for routing binding channels and creating pockets on guitar tops for honeycomb NOMEX.

Today, I started making guitar neck. I laid out where to cut the headstock on the blank which was sized by hand with a Lie-Nielsen No.62 hand plane. The blank I clamped to the workbench with two holdfasts and then I went at the stuff with a vintage Henry Disston and Sons miter saw that has a four inch deep web.


This saw is longer than a guitar neck!


I cleaned up the cut with a plane, then I finessed the two glue surfaces on sandpaper glued to a chunk of plate glass.



The final sanding was done of 220 grit and…


…here the finished scarf joint. All done by hand, no power tools, with patience and experience. I know that there are classical guitar makers that cut this joint on a table saw with a fancy jig.


Scarf joint all glued and clamped.

I do use a table saw and sliding compound miter saw to reduce neck stock, the piece of wood in the background of the above photo will be thinned to about 21mm on the table saw. For the final thickness I will plane it by hand, then cut out the heel blocks on the miter saw. 

Here are photos of the California laurel back and the curly redwood top that will be paired with this neck.




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