Making neck profile "cards"
Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 8:41 pm
Embarking on my first neck-shaping, I wanted some profiles to keep my work somewhere within the bounds of something playable. It's pretty easy to find neck profile images. I had several PDF drawings (they're the best) of Telecaster necks, several of which included profiles for the 1st and 12th frets. The trouble was, the drawing I used to make my neck template was a scrunch wider than the profiles I had.
So, here's what I did:
So, here's what I did:
- I opened the PDF, zoomed in on each neck profile, and did a screen-grab. I use Screenpresso (a free open-source product that works well, but if you have Snagit that works great too). This gave me a hi-resolution JPG image for each profile.
- I opened each profile image in a program called BigPrint that's offered by Matthias Wandel on his woodgears.ca website. It costs $22 and is worth every penny. You "scale" the drawing by selecting two points on the image and specifying how far those two points are in a full-scale image. In this case, I specified the neck width to match that of my neck, then printed each image.
- I used to buy gas using "gift" cards to support my sons scout troop, and always saved them. I also steal the room "keys" any time we travel. They make great scrapers, glue-spreaders, shims etc. I took two of them, and traced around the printed images with an x-acto knife.
- I ran several beads of thin CA glue on each card, paying particular attention to the edges and around the neck profile, then positioned the cut-out paper profile onto the card, and spritzed on some accelerator.
- I roughly cut out the neck profiles with some shears, then got the card to the final shape using an oscillating spindle sander.
- I marked the cards to indicate the guitar, position and neck width.