MIMF

Hi Everybody, long time no see!

I need your collective wisdom on a design brain f**t I cannot seem to get over.
In building a guitar with a fan fret multiscale, how do you deal with the headstock break angle? Do you just warp the headstock following the nut angle? Do you compensate with a varying thickness in the veneer?
Do you plane the headstock angle as usual and add a wedge later?

I join my headstocks with a scarf joint, so I'd like to keep things square during the glueup...

Thanks for your help, as usual!

Ciao!

You can do it any way you can make it work. There are no rules to follow, but there is good sense to follow. You can use the angled nut to establish the headstock face angle, which actually looks best in my mind. Or you can let the neck/fingerboard go past the nut and square off like normal, and set your nut at the appropriate angle to match the frets. This would probably be easier to do and you could use a symmetrical headstock.

If you want to maintain a constant break angle over the nut you could do the scarf joint using a thicker piece of wood for the headpiece and a lower degree angle for the scarf, then plane the face angle (and matching back) into the peghead. This would allow you to keep things square during glueup, have a normal thickness peghead (necessary for most tuners) and a constant thickness face veneer. You will use a little bit more wood for the peghead.
Alternately you could just let the break angle over the nut vary a bit.

Michael Lewis wrote: Or you can let the neck/fingerboard go past the nut and square off like normal, and set your nut at the appropriate angle to match the frets. This would probably be easier to do and you could use a symmetrical headstock.

The problem doing it that way is that it looks quite apallingly amateurish ... http://acousticguitarforum.com/forums/s ... p?t=273404. I am sure that the builder won't do it the same way again.