Notches Everywhere!

 

Firstly, sorry for the poor photographs. My camera seems to be having problems. I'll borrow my daughter's camera next time.
Work on the neck continues: I shaped the back of the neck where it connects to the head stock, rounded the body of the neck and tapered it up to where it fits into the body. It looks much more like an actual guitar neck, now, and feels great when you hold it. The top side is still fairly rough in comparison, but the finger board will be glued over the top of it, so I don't want to spend a great deal of effort finishing it. Just making it smooth enough that the finger board will flush up against it is enough. I also didn't want to do anything with the head stock just yet, because the tuning machines haven't arrived yet. I want to measure them, etc, so I can place them properly before I get all fancy with the headstock. (if I'm gonna get all fancy at all).



Next thing I tackled was notching the neck so it will fit into the body properly. No, wait. That's not what I did next, but it should have been. What I did do next was cut the notches in the body (the Cigar Box that gives the guitar it's name) so the neck would fit into it. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.




Now is when I notched the neck so it would fit into the body. But see, I already notched the body to fit the neck in it's pre-notched state, so when I was done notching the neck the notches in the body were too big because now the neck had notches in it. Crud. Anyway, I'm convinced I can work around it and still make it look decent in the end. Lesson learned. This is what the neck looks like with it's spiffy new notches.


Cigar box guitars most often have the neck extend all the way through the body of the instrument. Usually if it's constructed like a regular guitar where the neck just attaches to the end of the body and the strings are anchored to the sound board, the guitar will break or bow terribly under the stress of the stretched strings. The common way to make them is to just affix the board used for the neck to the inside of the top of the cigar box. As I was working on this guitar it occurred to me that if the neck board made contact with the top of the cigar box over it's entire length that it would dampen the vibration of the top generated by the strings. That seems counter productive to me. So I decided to not only notch the neck so that the top edge is flush with the front of the body/box to accommodate the fingerboard crossing over onto the body, but also to notch the middle so that it only made contact with the guitar top on the edges, allowing the top to vibrate more freely and hopefully getting better sound, sustain and volume. We'll see when I'm done if it actually turns out that way.



Now that everything has notches cut in it, the neck and body can be fit together. I'm not going to glue them yet because I want the neck free for installing the tuning machines, and the tail of the neck that sticks out the other side of the body will be trimmed down to a shorter length, but it's still sort of cool seeing it look a little more like a guitar