000 guitar build - fretboard installed

Fretboard is now installed. This part was a bit terrifying. The neck needed to be clamped with a slight up bow to counteract the back bow of the fretboard. Once the frets are installed the fretboard takes on a back bow because the frets act as tiny wedges forcing it that way. Clamping with an up bow will help the neck be strait on its own. At least in theory.

Here's the terrifying part. The neck needed to be clamped by the headstock and bent slightly by propping up the heel with a stick. No big deal, right? Except that this guitar is a slot head, so there are giant holes in the headstock. I could easily see this going horribly wrong.

To give the outer wood of the slots something to push against, I made little braces to fit in the slots out of floor shims. The pieces of shim can be moved up and down relative to each other to adjust the width of the brace for a snug fit.

Once all the clamping was done, I masked off the truss rod to keep glue out of there. A truss rod in a guitar is used to adjust how much the neck bends once the guitar is assembled.

Not sure what order the pics will show up in, but here is what they are of:

The neck with frog tape

The neck with glue over the wood and tape

The neck after the tape was removed. Just realized in posting these pictures that there was no reason to mask off up by the headstock since the truss rod channel doesn't extend that far. Oh well, much too late to worry about that now.

The neck with fretboard being clamped by giant rubber bands.