Hmm. Just like buses – projects all come along at once. I was looking for a new guitar for my daughter. StewMac have a kit where the body is already built – the remaining work is pretty straightforward. Plus it is fairly cheap, even including postage and import taxes. Plus the reviews say it sounds excellent. So a good summer project for me and my daughter – she’ll get to say that she made her own guitar!

We haven’t got very far yet – just the first couple of steps. These are to do with fitting the truss rod into the neck.

The kit comes with a strip of spruce to fill in the truss rod slot in the neck. This was a bit thin – 0.5mm – close to the heel. I queried this with StewMac and they said it was ok. However, since the strip isn’t supposed to be glued in I didn’t want a potential buzz. So I made my own strip out of mahogany to match the rest of the neck, then planed it down flush. Looks much nicer even though it will be hidden by the fingerboard.

I’m quite prepared to find out that I’ve done something stupid here. We’ll see.

On with the next stage – the peghead veneer.

Update 2023-07-30: Peghead veneer

The veneer wasn’t square to the grain, so the first step was cutting the end where the nut sits.

I also trimmed the outline to roughly the shape of the peghead to make clamping and trimming easier.

Then it was just a case of gluing it on. Not easy as it slides everywhere but the right place. Got it there eventually.