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I have mostly finished carving a neck and am working on the final fitting to the body. As you can see in the picture the neck is slightly higher on the bass side and I am wondering how to level it out. Do I simply plane the gluing surface to align or should I shave/sand the tenon to allow it rotate into better alignment? Other ideas?

Details: Mahogany neck, mortise and tenon neck joint with barrel bolt connectors (snug but not fully tight in this picture). Neck is joint is about 90% fit with just a little flossing and undercutting of the heel to seat it fully flush with the body.

Any advice appreciated. Thanks everyone.

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Registered Architect (Texas, New York)
LEED AP

That's really interesting, Todd. So if I had been following your work plan, I would now have a headstock with no plate on it. Which would leave me freee to plane the neck now and then set the head plate and thereby the nut position. Right? I will try that next time.

For this guitar I think if I widen the bolt holes in the neck block just slightly it will allow enough rotation (with a small shim, as you suggested) to get the neck into plane.

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Registered Architect (Texas, New York)
LEED AP

So if one were to cut a scarf joint for the peghead (which I'm about to do) one would wait until the initial neck fitting is done, final plane the top of the neck then cut the scarf?

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Thank You and Best To All

no just leave it thick and do the final planing and refining of the headstock after fitting the neck and truing the fretboard surface. then finalize the heastock relative to the fb surface.

I Like it. Thank you.

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Thank You and Best To All

I Like it. Thank you.[/quote]
just be sure to leave the distance from the neck/body joint to the headstock break a little long so you have some to clean up when you finalize it. Mark your break for the angle and then move it over 1/16-1/8 and then draw your cut line for the scarf. That assures you will have some material to plane off assuring that you get a nice flat headstock and don't have to plane down past the break point to achieve this. Does that even make sense haha. Moral of the story is leave a little material for clean up.

If you make adjustments to your tenon or to your bolt holes the other thing that's going to change is the alignment of your heal to your back plate.

If you've got a plain mahogany back this little shift might not be all that noticable. But if you've already carved your heal to a small point and you've got a back with a center strip in it or some dramatic figure that shows off the center line, this might appear really out of wack. A friend of mine has had that happen a couple of times

So you might need to decide which surfaces you want out of alignment. Given a choice I'd probably go with the headstock being a little bit out.

If you were to handplane the surface level with the soundboard, wouldn't that in turn move your nut location back slightly? This is an interesting scenario that I have not yet thought about before my first build and something I can see happening very easily. But, I would also assume that the mortise being slightly out of whack to be the issue as long as all your points of reference during you neck construction were truly square.

I didn't notice if you said anything about the center line of the heel lining up with the centerline of the back. I would start with that and take it from there. You may have left enough material to straighten it in final carving, maybe not.

if the centerline is out then most likely the m&t are off. I'd fix that first. it may level the fingerboard with the top. Once you are happy with that then preceed as Todd said

Opps! Just noticed Phil made the same point

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Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust

The heel at this point should not be carved,so the center line of the heel should not be a factor and this would have been an easy fix when you were putting in the shim. I just mention this for future reference. Also trying to make the neck fit before doing the head with a scarf joint is just asking for trouble in my estimation.
Tom

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

wish this thread came up several months ago!

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We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at guitars.