Splinting the Neck

I now need to cut some hardwood splints to glue into the channels. Out comes the bandsaw that I bought some time ago off EBay, but haven't even attempted to use yet. I've never used a bandsaw before, so this will be a steep learning curve!

First problem - motor spinning but saw blade not moving. That was solved by reattaching the drive belt. It can be adjusted across 3 different pulley sets to run at different speeds and just hadn't been put back on properly.

Next I adjusted the guide fence to the right distance and tried to cut a slice of wood off the back of the cill. The blade wandered all over the place, as I hadn't adjusted the blade guides properly. 

With that sorted, things were looking much better but it was really struggling to cut the dense hardwood, at which point I realised that the blade is blunt as anything so I need to get a new one.

I resorted to my trusty handsaw.... Now I need to form 2 pieces, roughly 13 x 13mm cross section and about 50mm long.

This is one of them. The ends need to match the curve of the router cutter so I made a simple template by routing a hole through some hardboard using the same cutter and then scribed the shape onto one end of the splint.

The band saw has a sanding disc as well (but the side table to support the wood is missing, so I had to very carefully do this by hand. Don't do this at home boys and girls.)

I used the sanding disc to carefully sand down to the scribed line and then did the final shaping with a piece of sandpaper, before repeating at the other end. I took a lot of time over this to get as snug a fit as possible. Love this sanding disc - it made the job so much easier than doing it all by hand.

I showed the area where the wood had splintered away on the junction with the fretboard on an earlier post. I cut this away and, before gluing up, I put some glue in here and mixed it with some of the sawdust to form a very basic filler. I'm not sure how well that will work but I think that it must be better than just filling the void with glue

Then I glued and clamped everything up and removed the squozen out glue again with a damp cloth.

I'll give that 24 hours to dry and then use a rasp to roughly shape the splints back to the neck profile, before starting the reinforcement across the back of the neck. 

The neck is starting to look a lot stronger now 😊.