Faith Naked Venus Neck Repair - Introduction

Project #1 - a Faith Naked Venus acoustic guitar, with a broken neck.

First the good bits. The Naked Venus has a great reputation. They were voted UK's Best Acoustic Guitar in 2013 (not sure who by - possibly Faith !!). 

https://www.faithguitars.com/guitars/by-series/naked-series/product/125-fkv-venus-concert-cutaway-electro

The specification is all solid wood with spruce top and mahogany sides, back and neck. There is very little ornamentation on the guitar, except for some very beautiful detailing in the abalone rosette and fret markers, and it has a very limited satin finish - the theory being that the tonewoods are given maximum opportunity to resonate, and this is borne out by the very positive reviews it gets. It comes with an onboard tuner and under saddle pick up / preamp.

I think this one is about 6 or 7 years old. It has a few small scars from being played, but I'm fine with that - I want it to become my "out and about" / festival guitar.

The Naked Venus is still a current model and retails (2019) at just over £500. I got this one for £90 off EBay, but unplayable with the broken neck. I thought it would be a quick and easy fix, ready for the 2018 festival season (12 months ago!) ......

When it arrived, the break was found to be proper nasty on 3 counts:

• Firstly, it has cracked almost horizontally, leaving a very limited area of wood to re-glue and meaning that the glue plane would be under a large shear force when the strings are back on.

• Secondly, someone had already tried to repair it and it had failed again, so the faces of the break are covered in old glue, which makes it very difficult to re-glue. (When I started stripping it down, I found a bill for the previous repair inside the body, for £20 more than I paid for the guitar :-) )

• Thirdly, the fingerboard has also detached for part of the way down the neck, and is also contaminated with old glue residue.

Here's the damage:

So, I have spent a long time thinking about the options for how to repair this. 

1. initially, I thought I would clean up all the old glue faces as best I could and then use marine epoxy to re-glue. Known for sticking to anything like wotsit to a blanket and having very good gap-filling properties, I thought this would definitely stick it back together but would probably look a bit raggy and also have a good chance of failing again because of the location of the crack.
2. As first option, but rout out a narrow channel either side of the truss rod and glue in a carbon fibre rod to add strengthening across the joint. This would mean taking the fingerboard off and reinstating afterwards.
3. As an alternative to this, I thought I could cut away a long parallelogram of the neck across the joint (say about 2" long) and create 2 scarf joints, so that I'd have a much bigger glueing face.
4. Given that I want to do a full build ultimately, I started thinking maybe I could make a new neck, as a practice for the full build.  I thought that, once I was happy I had a functional neck, I could rout away all of the mahogany from the back of the original headstock, so I was just left with the veneer and Faith logo etc, then reglue that to my new neck.
5. Confession time: I did contact Faith to see if I could buy a new neck but got no reply. That felt like a cop-out anyway, because the idea is to develop my woodworking skills.
6. I finally settled on what I think is a really elegant solution, after discovering this You Tube video https://youtu.be/owbEThXSACE
   Basically, you glue the neck back together, but only to provide enough strength to work on it. Then you rout out a channel down each side of the neck, perpendicular to the joint and extending past it and then glue in a new matching section of wood. Then you rout across the back face of the neck, again across the joint and extending past it, and glue in a new facing piece, before shaping everything and refinishing it.
   

This is kind of the way I was thinking in option 3 (letting in a parallelogram of new wood), but broken down and done in a very much more managed way, so that everything should stay in alignment. It also means that I don't need to remove the fingerboard, as I should be able to resolve that as part of the fix.

This method gives a nice big glue area and also strengthens the joint. It should also allow me to end up with a reasonable finish, although I am not going to really try and hide the repair.

Well, now that I have discovered that method, there's no stopping me. The first festival is in a week's time and the target is to take it with me to play!