Official Luthiers Forum!

I was reading Cumpiano's book about making necks. Is there any reason way the headstock has to be from the same piece as the body of the neck? I have several nice pieces of Spanish Cedar 18" long. Long enough for the body but not the head stock. I was thinking of making the headstock separate out of 1/2 stock. As long as the color match was good what would be the issue? It would require two cuts instead of one but as long as they were accurate the should work. Thanks Bill the Greenman

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Mistakes are mandatory-learning from them is optional. http://www.opensourceluthiersupply.com

Do it!

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Jordan Aceto
Ithaca, NY

-Jordan Aceto has 100x my experience, so it was good to hear him say what I was gonna say anyway: do it!
Assuming your wood is dry and relatively stable, you can get away with a lot. And have fun to boot...
Torres made necks with scarf joints any old place; he used the wood he had. He made some, um, pretty good
guitars. *We're not making the Space Shuttle*, here. I think using what's available is cool, non- wasteful,
and will soon become necessary anyway. I'm putting a Cedro head on a Mahogany neck now, because I don't
have any of the latter, want to keep the head light, and just like the idea of not having the "ideal" materials,
anyway- other than soundboards, for now, anyway .

Sure, do it. Cedro is usually plain looking and you can hardly have matching issues. If the whole color doesn't match, no problem either, since the join lines are covered by tuner plates, or inside the slots, or at the tip of the head angle. And if you do a V-joint, you'd probably want more contrast between the pieces.

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Build log

-as long as the joint is good, I couldn't care less if a line shows, or contrast is evident. Like I said, this isn't the Space Shuttle. In fact, that's *better*.