Another newbie question

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on July 17, 2012 at 3:27pm

Karl,

You'll see a lot of people do 'em anywhere from 10-20 degrees. Lots of builders go with 12-14 degrees for 24.5"-25" scale necks, like Gibson and Fender.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Woods on July 17, 2012 at 4:45pm

Karl,

Just finished my 1st scarfed headstock.  Don't know the angle, I just eyeballed it from my acoustic & LP (wannabe) electric , but the cut is 2 1/2" through a 3/4" board.  I am quite pleased with it.   You are corect - it is a lot of fun for an old guy!!

 

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/photo/cohiba-4-string-9

 

 

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Permalink Reply by Rusty Pup (Mark) on July 19, 2012 at 7:52am

I found an excellent resource here on The CBN in Josh Gayou's book, A Guide to Advanced Cigar Box Guitar Making. You can download the book free here:

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/page/free-plans

The link is just below the Smokehouse Guitars logo, about 1/4 of the way down the page.

Instructions on how he lays out and makes his scarf joints start on page 32 of that book. That's the method I use to make my necks, and it works great. The angle ends up being right at 11°, but that may not be exact, depending on how you clean up the cut. I clean up the cut on the neck and the headstock on my jointer, which doesn't change the angle much at all - if any.

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Permalink Reply by wormil on July 19, 2012 at 7:54pm

I did my first 2 scarf joints as shown in the e-book and they are working fine but if you flip the cut-off piece over you will be gluing true long grain to long grain where as the book's method is sort of end grain to long grain which is not as strong.

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Permalink Reply by Walter Cengia on July 22, 2012 at 9:06am

Hang on a mo, aren't you always gonna have a end grain to long grain with a scarf joint no matter which way round you attach it? One way it's on the neck and the other on the head stock, either way you will have the exact same gluing area.................................. Me thinks??????????

regards

Walt

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Permalink Reply by wormil on July 22, 2012 at 5:42pm

Not if you glue to the bottom of the headstock instead of the top. When you cut the joint, you have one side with end grain and one with long grain; same on the neck piece, just match them up. I did this on my current because I didn't want to glue ears on the headstock and wanted to hide the side joint best I could. I'll try to remember to take my camera to the shop tonight and snap a pic... worth a thousand words they say :)  Guitar headstocks have been made long to end grain for over a hundred years and it works fine, I'm not advocating one over the other just mentioning the differences. As someone pointed out, if you glue to the bottom of the headstock you'll probably want to hide the joint on top with veneer.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Woods on July 22, 2012 at 6:19pm

Interesting,

So are you making sort of a butt joint, but making the cut approx 85 degrees , then flipping the headstock to get the 10 degrees or so head angle??

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Permalink Reply by wormil on July 22, 2012 at 10:11pm

This will hopefully explain better than I can.

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Permalink Reply by Walter Cengia on July 23, 2012 at 3:51am

I see, so you're not flipping it over but simply taking it off the top and glueing it to the bottom on it's straight grain yes?

But does that not defeat the purpose of a scarf joint strengthening the head stock?

And you're left with end grains on both top and bottom of the head stock that will need to be veneered to dress it up

The whole idea is to change the direction of the grain so that the head stock wont snap under string tension if it's knocked or dropped, not just to save on timber.

All food for thought LOL

regards

Walt

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Permalink Reply by wormil on July 23, 2012 at 5:12am

Well I guess I does leave the bottom, back corner more prone to splitting off, if you dropped it just right. I've only seen a few broken ones and they were all broken near the nut where the neck is thinnest.

Then end grain actually doesn't look bad since it's cut at an angle but I planned on using veneer on the headstock anyway.

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Permalink Reply by The Phrygian Kid on July 24, 2012 at 4:35am

Hey Walt I think the whole idea is really about maximizing the surface areas which are glued. A change in direction of the grain in the timber is inevitable to some degree in this case (a guitar head) because you are turning a corner.
There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding in this culture that 'scarf joint' means specificly this method of making a guitar neck. In fact scarf joins have been around in many applications for centuries, they were particularly important in the old days of building wooden ships and airplanes.

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Permalink Reply by Dan Sleep on July 22, 2012 at 6:54pm

One way to make a scarf joint.

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