Neck joint innovations

[Sadie-f]

Originally Posted by JonWint

How did you cut a curved slot for your tension rod? The double rod is heavier but a lot less work than a single. Your photo shows it flat and too near the fretboard bottom surface.

You can't see it from above of course, the TR is threaded at each end, rh and lh threaded at each end respectively. The force is transmitted through brass plates and the heel end is 0.07" deeper below the fretboard than the head end. That difference is part of what makes it work. The channel is routed constant depth, no curvature.

And it does work well, I could tune it for back-bow quite easily. So it's at the correct depth (I drew a force diagram before building and it looked reasonable, so am not surprised it works well). If one wanted a neck with more heft, the TR would want to be set deeper or with more angle.

[mawmow]

Originally Posted by Aspiring

Lame horse guitars neck joint is very cool. (Along with a number of other great features).
Adjustable while under tension.

https://lamehorse.net/the-lame-horse-difference-1

Wow ! Amazing ! It appears to my amateur knowledge to be the most major advancement since Taylor bolted neck !
No more need of fastidious or expensive neck reset anymore…

Now, how the purists bond to glued neck would take it ?
I mean, does a less intimate binding of neck to body affect the tone ?

[Aspiring]

Originally Posted by mawmow

Wow ! Amazing ! It appears to my amateur knowledge to be the most major advancement since Taylor bolted neck !
No more need of fastidious or expensive neck reset anymore…

Now, how the purists bond to glued neck would take it ?
I mean, does a less intimate binding of neck to body affect the tone ?

It's pretty hard to say what if any impact his neck joint design has on the tone as the rest of the guitar is also pretty unique, but at the end of the day his guitars have sounded great to me.

[Roccorobb]

Originally Posted by gr81dorn

Have you played thr 18 and 28 yet? And, actually, the all sapele one sounds fantastic.

I haven't played the 18 and 28, but agree the spelled topped one is pretty great. It surprised me after having played several of the spruce topped ones.

[jricc]

Originally Posted by Sadie-f

Below is my first build, I'm happy with her, the neck joint is my own design, and will be a one-off. l think it's a bit more structurally sound than most bolted designs. I'm an engineer specializing in materials science, and like to get the details right, however this is a very labor intensive design.

In photos below, see the nuts are captive inside a hollow 1/2" oak dowel glued into the tenon. This means the loading within the neck is in end-grain oak. And if I were being truly thorough, I could have done the same in the neck block, however the bolt loading there is spread wider by a washer, so I think it's stable for the long haul.

The cap screws, captive nuts and washers are all titanium, about 1/2 the weight of steel hardware, and stronger, so I'll say this is about as light as can be done in a bolted neck. It's not a big thing, the weight of a comparably strong bolted mortise and tenon is always going to be heavier than a glued dovetail, and I'll be using a dovetail on all future builds (this design is more work).

I did it this way to enable my plan of changing out tops this build is a (successful so far) experiment, and I have a second top in cedar that I think will have better tone (for what I'm looking for, but it's also going to inform my planning for what build will permanently own a cedar top, and for that, I'm leaning to a black locust b&s instrument. Once I decide which top stays on this guitar, I'll be gluing just the fretboard extension to the top, I'm unlikely to be convinced that bolting the extension to the upper bout is a good design for tone.

I'm planning that all future builds will be dovetail, because it looks to me like less work for a better result. Of course, I can always change my mind, however now that I've been through the exercise of hand fitting neck to body, the idea of a neck reset isn't the least bit daunting.

Finally he truss rod is the Santa Cruz design, it's single acting and considerably lighter than any other design I've seen. It's kinda genius! .. I might build future guitars using a titanium rod, again, lighter still, and against all the other work of building a guitar, I think .. why not? (Well, attaching the TR drive nut will be tricky in Ti)

Sorry off topic, but @Sadie-f, I'm still so impressed with your great work on this guitar, love it!