Official Luthiers Forum!

I built one. Love it. Definitely not a "copy carver". Took me a while to get it right. I actually called Kevin on the phone one afternoon. Nice guy. He explained to me how he built it and it was about identical to what I had built. I was missing one thing and he filled in the blanks for me. The trick to this jig is making the templates for it. You can carve the same neck profile as many times as you like. However, your dimensions must be consistent from neck to neck or your thickness will be off. I have an excel speadsheet that calculates the template dimensions. It takes everything into account - scale, radius, fretboard thickness, etc. It does all the trigonometry and then I simply resize a graphic of the neck shape in photoshop to the dimensions it gives me. I then print that out and cut the templates to that shape. The beauty of this setup is that you can do asymmetrical profiles and really get them dialed in. This is possible without the jig, but the jig offers a level of consistency not possible with hand carving.

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"I'm not going to say that perfection has never been achieved. However, if it has, it probably went unnoticed due to it's lack of character."

That looks so much less enjoyable than hand carving...
Look at his expression.
Just another Monday!

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I think Charles Fox had it going on with his "deadhead platen" on a belt sander. Check this link (about 2 or 3 posts down) for a YouTube video of it in use.

http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-home-de ... ander.html

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http://www.presnallguitars.com