Well, it’s been a long strange year, between hiding out on our mountain top and trying to avoid Covid as well as dealing with a loved one’s health issues. Instrument building was put on hold while I finished up work on my shop. Now that I’m beginning to get back to work on instruments, first up is building some jigs to not only restore a vintage parlor guitar, but also to use on the restoration of what I consider to be an historically significant Vega parlor guitar. The first task at hand was reinforcing the neck with a hollow square steel truss rod. Normally, the slot for the truss rod is done while the neck is still in the beginning stages of construction and it’s much easier to work with because it’s still mostly square. It’s considerably more difficult to do when the neck is already carved and it is being retrofitted. In this case, I built an open top box that not only holds the neck solidly but locates the fretboard surface directly under a plexiglass guide that the router can follows using a bearing guide. The bearing guide fits in the plexiglass slot and makes the whole process pretty unthunk. Here’s what the neck looks like when locked down in the jig and the next picture shows the neck with the truss rod epoxied into the neck.
