Sorting the neck and headstock

From the original post about the parts I have for this build, you will recall that on this occasion, I am using an NOS Les Paul neck that I had bought some time ago. I saw it for sale on the web and couldn't miss the opportunity. As this is my first ever attempt at building a guitar, I also think making a neck from scratch may be beyond me. I will however, definitely be making my own for the next build as during the process of researching this one, I can see it is entirely possible and not beyond my limited skills.

Here's how the neck originally looked in the pics of the materials I have bought.



So the first thing to do is remove the unfinished section on top of the peg. To do this, I simply used a wire hand saw and cleaned up the tenon with sandpaper, giving me the resulting finish:



I have also made a few cardboard templates of the neck profile at key points along its length and hand sanded the neck, checking with the templates that the curves are correct as they travel along the length. The heel you see in this photo is correct for the model. Later Les Pauls had a much more rounded heel.



The rear of the headstock was totally unfinished and quite a lot of time is spent removing the excess wood with my hand sander to create the right blend of the neck, running in to the flat surface of the rear of the head.

Next, came the headstock overlay. This again, was an original NOS overlay with the Gibson logo already installed in nice Mother Of Pearl. Using the actual headstock as a template, I drew around the veneer overlay and cut it out roughly to shape, leaving a little excess around the sides and top.






This was then glued to the head using wood glue, sandwiched between the head and the MDF template I used to cut the overlay. Once in place and the glue is dry, the small amount of excess can be hand sanded away until it is flush with the headset wood.

All that remains fro the neck is final sanding and polishing of the headstock veneer, ready for final top coats.