Installing the Tuners

The main job I did on the guitar is installing the tuners into the headstock. But before I come to that first to the position dots. They point out where the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 12th.15th, 17th, 19th and 21st fret are located. They are embedded into the side of the fret board. I go for wooden dots. First I had to mark the center between the frets:

Then the center is drilled with a 3mm drill.

After that little sticks of wood are glued in:

And sanded back:

Back to the tuners. I need to drill 10mm holes into the headstock but of course first figure where. The back of the tuners is about 2.3cm so I need about 14cm distribution space. I drew out where they should come:

I want to drill the holes with a drill-press but it is hard to aim the drill since it has some natural tollerance which can result in a slightly off place hole. So I drilled the holes to about 3mm with a cordless drill to have a start for drill-press:

 The holes are then drilled through with the drill press:

The tuner near the nut was positioned just on top of where the headstock gets thicker so I needed to embed it into the headstock:

  The end result:

Last thing I did was gluing in a support brace for the bridge:

Headstock shaping

Now the headstock plate is in place I can start to bring it to it's final shape. Not many "action" pictures but the result is pretty nice!:

The bottom part of the headstock still needs to be shaped but we are getting there. And for the total overview:

Head Stock Plate Volume 2

It has been exceptional weather for the time of the year the past few days so I decided to work on the head stock plate in the back garden to soak up the last sunbeams. I placed the graphite rod in its slot in the head stock.

Then the dark rosewood veneer was first up to be glued to the head stock. Then another layer of glue (the bone nut is used as the separator to the fret board:

The plate itself is placed on top of it and the whole sandwich is clamped together:

After the clamps where removed the result looked like this:

With a knife I removed the excess veneer. The head stock plate is still to big and needs to be sanded and filed down to the head stock. But it looks nice already:

Tuners

The Hipshot Classic Tuners came in. Aren't they nice?