[patchmcg]

UPDATE FROM DAN
Obviously references are to other projects he's done for other OFC'ers

"Removed the neck from the 1624 yesterday."



"I cleaned off the excess epoxy from the dovetail area. The square piece of metal between the fretboard extension and the dovetail is the truss rod anchor."



"Interestingly, this is a dovetail (glue-on) neck on an SMC bowl meant for a K-Bar neck. The serial number dates the guitar to 1985/86. The neck looks to me like it was glued to the bowl at the factory.

Here's the 1624 bowl on top of the parlor bowl. From this shot you can get a good idea of how much black epoxy it took to set the dovetail neck into the bolt-on pcoket. As has been said before Ovation used whatever they had at hand to keep building guitars."



"Here's a close-up of the neck pocket in the body."







"Taking the neck off this guitar was interesting. I knew it was an SMC bowl and there was a single bolt hole on the inside. I figured the neck was a dovetail neck, but I wasn't sure what was lurking inside the pocket. And, to top it all off, the molded-in neck block is quite thick, so I wasn't really enamored with trying to cut the neck off the bowl."



"When I did the bowl bend on Jay's 485 I used my trusty heat gun. It worked, but didn't keep every part of the bowl an even temperature. For this, I decided to try IR lamps like the kind you buy in the hardware store to warm up the bathroom when taking a shower. They did work, but because they are only 125W each, it takes a while to heat the wood. These would work well to do a bowl bend because they do heat up large areas. In the end, I used my trusty heat gun.

The trick to removing the necks, or any part on an Ovation is you've got get the epoxy up to a temperature where it'll soften and turn rubbery. For the most part, room-temperature cure epoxy will start to soften at around 170-180 degrees.

For a glue joint like the bridge, you can heat up the part pretty quickly. But, with a deep joint like the neck, you need to heat soak the external areas and let the heat sink down deep enough so it'll soften the glue.

Once the glue gets soft enough, you just need to start moving the neck back and forth to break loose the glue."