What a lot of work went into this… Koa is a tough wood- hard to cut and hard to sand or remove with a rasp. I started out on the shaper trying to get the bulk of the wood removed but the neck broke free of the jig and shot across the room. Fortunately there was little damage to the neck, the room or myself, but after this experience I took out my rasps and set to work, manually removing anything that didn’t look like a guitar neck. Several hours later I was able to start sanding. Next up, the abalone dots. Once these were dry, at approx. 1AM, I set to work gluing the fretboard to the neck using only hot hide glue. I’m finally getting the hang of using this stuff- you have to work very fast, get everything ready before you apply it. Sometimes it helps to heat the wood with a heat gun first but in this case I just applied the glue to both objects, pulled the protective masking tape off the truss rod area, and slapped the pieces together. Unlike the white or yellow stuff, hot hide glue doesn’t slide all over the place, making alignment easier as I clamped the pieces together. After I trimmed off the excess fretboard this morning, I applied a little tung oil just to see how it is going to look.
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