Neck Preparation

After a slight pause while I went off on a cycling holiday and then started a new job, I've made a start on the guitar again last night. After my last post, the neck had been rough sanded back to remove the existing lacquered finish.

The next stage was to fine sand the neck to get a smooth finish. I am doing this in two stages - first with 120 grade fine sandpaper and then before I apply the finish I'll take it down finally with 0000 grade wire wool. Here's the neck after sanding with the fine sandpaper:

As part of this prep, I need to fill in and try to conceal a previous repair. One reason for doing the fine sanding early was to "harvest" some of the sawdust to use in that repair:

Here's the old repair - a really ugly scar. It's not flush with the surface and you can see the glue that was used.

The first thing to do was to "gouge" out the surface glue with a knife. It starts looking worse before it gets better!

Next, I propped up the guitar so that the site of the repair was horizontal and stable. You can see my sophisticated workshop and equipment here!

I then tipped some of the sawdust into the scar, tapping the neck to make sure it settled well into the crack.

Next, I applied a few drops of Super Glue to the sawdust. The theory said that the sawdust should suck the glue straight through it and into the crack, but I found that the glue sat on the surface. It did bleed through after a short while though.

The problem was that I had to put a bit more on because of that and some of it ran round the neck ....

(It was OK though - that sanded off fine at the next stage. Phew!) After leaving the glue to harden for a couple of hours, I sanded the repair back down with medium sandpaper, being very careful to just sand the repair and not the surrounding wood, as I didn't want to create a "hollow" in the neck. Then I fine sanded again. I was really pleased at the result - a nice smooth repair. Although it is darker than the surrounding wood, this is the colour that the whole neck is likely to end up after the next stage and I think it should blend in really well.

Finally, a wipe down with white spirit to get rid of dust and it's looking even better. I'll do the wire wool rub down just before I start to apply the new finish at the next stage.