makepeace wrote
I am to guess that we're to see lots of old school wood working?
Meh. I tend to choose the method that gets me to the required accuracy fastest, not married to a method.
This for instance would not really qualify as old school:
Making up the truss rod rout, which is to accomodate the StewMac double acting trussrod. Heavy, overly complicated and expensive, this HotRod is not my favourite. I still went for it on this guitar because I really do not know how the neck is going to take the considerable string pull.
Being so narrow, this rout needs to be cut with a small size router bit. The fact that we're cutting into Maple makes this a tricky job if you do not think it through. One way would be to go for a dozen one millimeter deep cuts, without prep. Instead, the choice was made to predrill on a drill press with the wood sitting against a back stop. The drill press is equipped with a depth stop as well, so we are pretty sure that we take out as much wood as possible without ever touching the cut lines.
Also note the back stop is nothing but a scrap piece of Ash clamped down with two glue clamps. The base of the drill press is taped up with masking tape to not get scratches and to have lekker slide - wood tends to stick to greasy metal.
The routing itself:
Look what's going on here. Two pieces of scrap wood are bolted to the router base (you can actually see one of the countersink bolts shank up with nut and washer, to the right of the cutter) and form the guide. There really is no way the router bit is going to come out of its straight line. It cuts to depth in one go and you can see the meat left on the left side of the cutter. You want to always cut so that most of the wood you take away is on the side where the cutter runs into it - makes it easier to control the feedrate.
The rod sitting snugly in its groove, with the top exactly level with the wood. I believe it contributes to sustain to have the rod ends sit solidly in the wood for maximum energy transfer. The widening of the rout for the shank of the rod nut was quickly chiseled by hand; no need to be accurate here. Also clearly visible is a cut into my workbench - I can be such a muppet. In my defense, the workbench is twenty years old in this picture.
