Tenon Route Complete

With the tenon route done, it's now time to sharpen the chisels and begin fine tuning the neck fit.

Neck Pocket Template

With the neck near completion I've made a template for routing the neck tenon. This is one point where I'm changing the Firebird blueprint considerably. My neck is going to be set much deeper into the body. This will result in the neck feeling less "long", and will also bring the top layout of pickups, bridge, etc...further back. Once the neck is glued in I'll probably end up deepening the lower, treble side cutaway to allow a bit more access to the upper frets.

Headstock Layout

Here I have layed out and cut the headstock to size. Basically a 50's Gibson shape.

Neck with Fingerboard

Here the fingerboard is now glued to the neck. The neck is still very much oversized, I'll now do much more shaping of the profile as well as begin work on fitting the heel to the body.

Neck and Fingerboard

With the mating surface of the neck and fingerboard true, they are ready to be glued up.

Truing the Neck

The neck is 3-piece maple with a single-action compression rod. Here I am truing the neck preparing for the fingerboard to be glued on.

Binding Fingerboard

Gluing ivoriod binding to the fingerboard.
The fingerboard has been partially radiused and tapered.
Going with an 1 11/16" nut width (the ONLY nut width in my opinion), and tapered accordingly for a 2 1/16" string spread at the bridge.

Fingerboard Inlay

I choose an Amazon Rosewood fingerboard for the neck. I've worked with Amazon a bit and it's a nice dense rosewood, not to porous. Quite similiar to nice Brazillian rosewood. Amazon and Madagascar are really the only two rosewoods I'm interested in working with.

(I had already starting a lot of the neck work before I decided on doing this photo-documentation, so unfortuntaly I don't have photo's of the more raw wood and blanks used in the neck construction)

This photo shows the fingerboard slotted for a 25" scale length and Mother-of-Pearl double-parallelogram inlays.
These have always been my favorite Gibson style inlays and someday I'll own a 50's Southern Jumbo with these inlays.
I primarly build Fender style instruments so haven't really had the opporunity to use these inlays. When Casey mentioned the idea of a Firebird style guitar, one of the first visions I had was of these inlays.