Warlock neck

Category: Warlock

While waiting for the red paint to dry, I've started looking at the neck and head of the guitar. It's been sitting in the box in the garage for a few months now, and on pulling it out, I noticed a few issues. The neck has a pretty obvious bend backwards, which will need to be fixed up. It also looks like the factory had a bit of a mishap when putting in the markers on the 24th fret - there is some wood missing between the fret and marker, and the last fret is buckled upwards quite a bit. Time to do some work.

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First things first - adjusted the truss rod to bring the neck back straight. It needed almost a half turn of the rod, but seems to have straightened up nicely.

Next the buckled fret. I started by filing it down a bit, and hitting it a bit with a hammer. That did part of the job, but not enough. So in the end I squirted some glue underneath it and clamped it down tight for the day. That seems to have done the trick. A bit of time polishing out the file marks, then steel wool to make it shine, and it looks pretty good.

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Finally, the hole near the fret marker - I mixed up some black and brown Timbermate and pushed it in. That has done a nice job of disguising the hole.

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I've also done a quick fret level now that the neck is straight. I found that a few frets were sitting high (frets 5 and 12, I'm looking at you...), so out came the clamp again, which pushed them back down to level. I quick sand across the top and everything is looking pretty good.

This week I've also been building a router table, to make routing less likely to take a gouge out of my work or hand. Tried it out today to make a few headstock templates out of MDF. Consensus is that the one on the right is the better looking one.

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Update: I've routed the headstock shape, based on the template. The new router table performed well, and the shape looks good. Still have to sand it smooth and bevel the edges.

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