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The heel should have no glue AT ALL!

Thanks guys, I will certainly follow your experience next time around.

That being said, what methods do you use to floss the joint?

With the neck held in position, insert sandpaper strips between the body and the neck and pull it through while holding the neck to the body. As the back of the paper rides the body the cutting side sands the body shape into the neck heel. By altering the number of strokes and how much you sand each surface, you can make adjustments to the neck angle and center aliment.

_________________
Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

Good deal. That's how I altered the angle on this guitar. I suppose it's something that will take patience and practice.

Next on the block, probably.





Look closely... yes, another Takamine. Seems like this neck design could be attached with dowel rods instead of a dovetail. May be able to actually heat this one off.

Followup on the last post I made. This guitar presents a new set of challenges with a cutaway and wide/flat neck heel.

The f/b extension was very difficult to loosen on this guitar. Something about 45 years of hardened epoxy, probably. Nonetheless, it finally gave up but took some spruce with it.





Using the wire EDM at work, I removed all the dead space from the end of my Japanese saw so I could effectively cut square into the neck heel and not remove the fretboard. It worked pretty well, but due to the different angles I was working with - and no side wood to help maintain flatness near the cutaway - I cut into the side wood of the guitar's body a bit. Here you can see that I've already drilled bolt holes in the body. I should have done it this way with the last guitar, but I suppose lesson learned.



I've already relived the heel in the this photo and marked where the thread inserts need to go. Sadly the existing dowels caused the drill bit to wander, so I need to re-drill those larger and glue in even bigger dowels.



So right now I'm looking at replacing the piece of trim on the body that I cut into, and gluing in a thin piece of "something" to sand back down where I removed the side wood. Any suggestions for this process?

Not sure what you actually did to your razor saw with the wire EDM. Can show a pix? My razor saw only has about the last two inches sans the supporting metal backing. I managed to saw thru to the fretboard just using the end of the saw, but it was a bit tricky. I may have to buy one of the stew Mac saws. Wonder if you could clamp a guide on the cutaway side? Nice job of sharing. Thanks. Roy

Here you go - this is a StewMac saw too. I just removed the very tip without any teeth on it.

Got the inserts in place, but neither hole is perfectly aligned to the body. I think I'll just have to drill the body holes out larger and maybe use a stainless plate like I did on the Parlor guitar.



Binding removed.

So as not to hide my non-professional skills, I just wanted to point out this booger. I made the mistake of lightly tapping the dowel into place, and it popped out the mahogany on the neck heel. You can also see a line on the edge of the heel that has been re-glued - this was due to using a chisel on it at a poor angle and causing it to split. Several curse words were used during this process. Shame on me, but I did learn another two lessons this time around. Sadly I have more guitars with this same type of thin doweled-on heel, and they're very difficult to work with.

I always tell myself "nothing can be broken that can't be fixed somehow." I'll cover it back up with polyurethane and make it as nice as possible.

Looks like you filed or sanded off the head of the brass inserts..is that because you weren't sure you had enough heel wood to sink them below the surface? Was it difficult to do that without overly impacting the heel connecting wood surface? Roy

Correct - I had a little more than 1/8" sticking up, so I just buzzed it off with my pneumatic angle grinder.

As it was I already went a little too deep with the one on the bottom side. That neck heel has VERY little thickness at that point, less than 1/2".

Finished up all but about 10% of this guitar over the week. Here's a little update for how things went.

I ordered a few pieces of 1mm and .5mm maple headstock veneer from LMI and used it to build up the area on the side of the body where I cut too deeply with the saw. This worked perfectly for what I needed. I was able to buzz off most of the excess with an angle grinder and then flatten it down with a block.



Then it was time for some test fitting.



Bass side



Treble side



Bass side after further sanding the treble side of the neck.



Using a fret rocker to help get the side of the neck heel flat.





I also further block sanded the end of the body during this process.

During one of the test fits of the neck, my bottom thread insert decided to start pulling out. I applied some super glue to an extra bolt I had and removed the insert.



Here's a good indication of just how thin the heel is.



Time to dowel, again



This time my prior concerns came true when the drill bit just walked on through the heel. Oh well. I'm going to machine a little stud to attach a strap button here in the back half of the thread insert.



This time I just left the insert completely intact, as the matching hole in the body was large enough to accept it.



This was my final test fit before gluing and clamping the fretboard extension. See the tiny gap toward the bottom side of the heel? I did a little more work to that the neck morning after the glue dried.



Finally got myself some good clamps for the sake of the fretboard extension. No more fussing around with rubber inner tubes. Don't know why I didn't just get these before, they were only $10 each at Lowes.



Here you can see my latest revision - 1.25" stainless fender washers instead of a machined plate. Works just as good and saves time. As much as I would like the holes to line up well enough to recess the cap screws into the heel block, I have not been able to drill them nearly accurately enough for that to happen. From now on I think I'll just ream the body holes out to 1/2" with my StewMac endpin reamer. This ensures I have enough play in case the thread inserts didn't go into the neck at a perfectly straight angle. It's not the prettiest solution, but it certainly saves time. And that's just one way I can shave dollars off this procedure for others.

Here I am contouring the bottom of the heel to the slight radius on the body itself (after the f/b got glued down). That's why there was still a gap present - the heel was perfectly flat on the bottom while the body was curved slightly. I ended up removing a little wood where I didn't intend to on the bass side of the neck, about half an inch from the bottom of the heel. I didn't take a photo, but that's where a little wood filler will come in handy. Lesson learned. Next time I'm going to be sure there is no gap present anywhere before I glue the fretboard, and I'm probably going to block sand the body where the neck attaches until that area is completely flat as well.



Might be a little overset for some folks, but this just tells me it'll never need flossing again. Surprisingly, this is just basically where it landed once I cleaned up all the surfaces and got the neck heel flat on the sides.



Turns out, I did have a longer saddle for the non-electric Takamines, but this is all I found when I wanted to string it up. Still works fine, might fit the long saddle later. The intonation was surprisingly spot-on except for the low E and high B, so I compensated those.



Voila - for the most part this is done. It's playable, anyway. Need to lower the action on the treble side and refinish the neck heel where I had to sand on it so much.

Wipe-on poly is blending in nicely.



After sanding down to 5000 grit.

You did a fine job.

How's the intonation on it?

Thank you!

Intonation is surprisingly good. I compensated the Low E and high b on the saddle to make it just about perfect.

Good. That's the one potential problem with the sawed off method. And since you removed the FB it would have been easy to remedy it. But with those thin saws and a 1/8th inch saddle you can get away with it. I have done one where I had to convert the bridge to a wider saddle probably becasue the orginal position of the bridge wasn't very good.

Easy to remedy with a veneer of some kind glued back on the heel once flossing was done?

I checked the SF95 this morning (the first guitar in my thread) and found the both the low E and high b were ever so slightly sharp at the 12th fret, but barely enough to register with my Kliq tuner. Just normal playing you'd never notice. I can still compensate those on the saddle as well.

Next up. F363S with the heel coming loose at the back.







This one came loose VERY easily compared to the rest.

I went ahead and started to saw a bit, but I really should not have. Once I got through the finish the neck was loose enough to just pull off. So now I'm stuck removing material from the other side of the heel to make it straight. Oh well, another lesson learned. If a doweled neck is pulling up enough to see a gap at the heel cap, then it's probably loose enough to just wiggle off without sawing anything. This might be a guitar I experiment with gluing a .5mm veneer back on the heel.

Add to that, if this were a dovetail joint, it's extremely unlikely that you'd see the neck coming up at the back side like this either.









Drilled out the existing dowel holes to a larger size and doweled them again.

Yes but it will be noticeable. But I had done that too. I did that on a guitar that had cream colored binding so I shimmed it with a piece of maple finished matched to the binding so it looked intentional.

Eh, won't bother me too much. Call it a feature, not a bug. lol

Finished up the strap button on the F366S. Carefully chased M5 threads on a 1/4-20 cap screw and tapped the button.





I also got a little antsy and pulled the neck back off. The pitch was off just enough to drive me crazy, even though you could barely see it. I needed to remove just a hair of material on the bass side of the heel.





While it's back off I fixed the side marker I melted out previously and sanded through the poly to remove the heat-hazing.



And clamped/glued where the FB came loose about 1" down the neck.



I've also decided I'm going to experiment with a 1mm veneer on the heel before I reattach it to the body. If it works out well it's just a step I'll incorporate in each guitar from now on. The intonation is good enough and sounds fine, but I'll just feel better knowing it's that much closer to the right scale length.