I'm getting ahead of myself

Hello, hello, hello, I'm getting ahead of myself with this latest post because, quite frankly, if I don't speed up, I'll be finished the guitar before I'm halfway through the blog story and since it will take me forever to build the guitar, it will take two forevers to finish this blog...  So, let's fast forward a bit shall we.  (I must confess I'm a little short on pictures too, and who wants to read a boring blog without cool pictures to go along with it?!? I know I wouldn't!)

After I cut the neck out with the band saw and routed the dovetail with the router table I made, I proceeded to carve the neck with a dremel tool to get the rough rounded shape.  After that, I used a series of draw and carving knives to take it down further.  Then I used progressively finer gritted sand papers to smooth everything out.  When all is finished I'll use a cabinet scraper and 400 grit sand paper to put the final finish on the neck.  Other than routing the truss rod channel I have not yet touched the rest of the neck, including the fingerboard or the headstock.  Those will come later because, as I've said before, I'm very ADD and wanted to skip the hard stuff and move on to something more fun.

Which segues nicely into my next picture - joining the soundboard. 

Before I could get to this point I first went to Cayce Industries (they have a huge belt thickness sander) to bring the individual plates down to close the proper thickness.  Once that was done, I had to build a shooting jig (no I don't have a picture, but I can get one) to joint the plates.  This is extremely important as it is what lines up the two plates for joining.  If the common edge is not jointed properly, there will be gaps in the soundboard seam.  It took me a while, but I finally got the knack of shooting, and I finally make a joint good enough to join.  (This step also makes really pretty spruce curls that you can use in your book quality staged photos;-)  Before you glue, make sure you practice your steps so you have it down.  I put a slim piece of newspaper under the seam so that I wouldn't glue the plates to the work surface.  You lay the far plate down first against a stop and fasten it with clamps (I use fiberglass rods), then you put a thin bead of glue on the second plate, lay it down against the first, slide it back and forth, then clamp it from above.  After that you wedge it from the side to close up the seam nice and tight.  I let it dry over night and you can see the result below.

In an effort to keep my posts shorter so that more people may consider actually reading them, not that I hold any real faith that anyone will, I will stop boring you now...