Angled Headstock (3/3) ~ Luthiery Laboratories

Angled Headstock (3/3)

There is another way to build an angled headstock - the wrong way, or you might say the Gibson way. That is to use a single piece of wood thick enough to carve the entire neck out of. You might think that making it all one piece would be stronger, but it is not. The scarf joint uses the wood in its strongest directions - always along the grain. The Gibson way places a critical area of the wood in shear along the grain. Ever seen them split logs in a Western movie?

Add to that a lot of other design flaws, like brittle mahogany and too great an angle, and you end up with something that is going to break. Gibson's only solution to this terrible design is to put a piece of veneer over it. Often, that is all that ends up holding it together.

So that's how to build an angled headstock, and how not to. The wrong way actually looks like more work and more expense to me.

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Building Necks

My take on necks

When you play a guitar, are you tightly clutching the neck, or are you holding mostly air? Even if you tightly clutch the neck, does the actual shape really matter? As long as it does not present any obstacles to movement, the answer is NO. So what is all this fussing over neck profiles? MARKETING, that's what. The actual curve around the back of the neck is fairly irrelevant, apart from the overall thickness.

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Sharp Fret Ends

I took this 'Bird down from it's usual place up on the wall to take some measurements, and I noticed that it had grown fangs along the ( otherwise excellent Mighty-Mite ) neck that were not there before. Sharp fret ends is something I see people piss and moan about all the time. It is going to happen. It's not that the frets weren't dressed properly at the factory, the problem is that most guitars are made in warm humid places like China, Mexico, Indonesia, and Tennessee in the summer. Wood swells with moisture. When they are brought to the USA and placed in a dry heated winter house, the wood dries and shrinks a tiny bit, and the fret ends protrude. Everything about fretwork is a matter of thousandths of an inch, even the tiniest discrepancies are obvious. So this is not a defect, it is something that is simply going to happen, and it is easy to fix.

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