Gourd Banjo III

Shaping the Neck Day II


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It is the next day, Memorial Day, and the weather is grand. So I went outside to continue shaping the neck. I started out using the spokeshave on the straight parts of the neck. The neck was still pretty rough where I had chipped out all of those kerfs of waste wood, and I needed to smooth it out before doing the final shaping.

Spokeshave

The flat soled spokeshave also works on the convex parts.

Convex

Some of the spaces are too tight to get the spokeshave in there, so I chipped away slowly with a chisel.

Chisel

The small, concave places required a return to the card scraper. I tried the round bottom spokeshave, but I still cannot make that tool work, so I just used the scraper.

Scraper

On the concave areas of the ogee on the neck I used the gouge. As long as I take it slowly and I am really careful about which direction I am chipping the wood when near an edge, the gouge works really well. Sometimes I tap it gently with a rubber mallet, and sometimes I just pare with it.

Gouge

The dowel stick is really easy because it is just a straight taper. I used the spokeshave for that.

Dowel

The goal was to smooth the wood while paring the width of the dowel down to its final size, as indicated by the pencil lines I drew earlier.

Lines

Once I got it close to the right size I smoothed it off using the cabinet scraper.

Scraper

Final detailing is done with the shoe rasp. This goes really slowly on the hard maple.

Rasp

I spent about 3 hours cleaning up the neck. It was low stress fun today because of the nice weather and the sharp tools. The neck is still square in cross section. Next time I will round off the corners to their final shape.


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Original post date May 29, 2009




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Last updated June 1, 2009