Video: Cutting the Neck of an Electric Guitar

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Learn from a skilled craftsman how to cut the neck out for building a homemade solid body electric guitar in this step-by-step video guide to making musical instruments.

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skeim Nov 29, 2008
is there any videos about shaping the neck after it is cut?
skeim Nov 29, 2008
is there any videos about shaping the neck after it is cut?
hanz2 Oct 09, 2008
thanx to everyone that post this videos .....!!! this make me really want to try this way 4 my guitars .... anyway thanx a lot
hanz2 Oct 09, 2008
thanx to everyone that post this videos .....!!! this make me really want to try this way 4 my guitars .... anyway thanx a lot

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Frank Pope, FBI Guitars. I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to give you some tips on how to build your own guitar. Now I'm going to talk to you about cutting out the neck; show you the basic steps. The first step you're going to start with, is to have a piece of wood. This wood comes from Stewart McDonald, it's for making glue in necks. I think it's 3x2 1/2. You want to first run it on the jointer, make it sure all four sides are perfectly flat and perfectly smooth. If this is not smooth and perfectly flat on top, you can never have the flat finger board that we talked about before. First thing you're going to do with it is use the side cutting template. You'll put this template on to the wood. You'll mark it and you'll cut this out on the bandsaw. Just like this. Don't do anything else. Don't cut it out from the top yet. Because the next step is to route the truss rod channel in it. You're going to use the little router table and the dremel tool that we showed you earlier and this is to show you, this is what a router will do with the appropriate bit. You'll route this the entire length of this neck that you've cut out. Except you'll stop approximately here. This is where the end of the truss rod will be. Once you've done that you can then place this template on the top of the wood, which will be the piece you have cut out, and trace it and then cut this out as well. If you'll notice when you look at this piece of wood, it is not wide enough to make the little ears of the head. Don't worry about it. You don't want to start with a piece of wood wide enough to make the whole thing, you'll waiste a lot of wood. You can glue two little blocks of wood up here on top after you've cut this out and finish cutting the little ears out. Since they're inside, the holes are inside the solid piece of wood, it won't effect structurally the neck at all and it'll save you a lot of wood. Let me say one other thing to you. If, when you try to route this truss rod slot, you find that after you've cut it, it's not perfectly in the center of the neck, remember this neck doesn't use the whole width of this wood. Don't panic, adjust the center of your neck to your truss rod. Don't build a neck with the rod routed to the side, just move everything over and begin with the neck from that point.

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Cutting the Neck of an Electric Guitar

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