If you will recall, the neck was clamped on August 16, and I planned to unclamp it after a month. Well, no thanks to a busy schedule, the clamps were only removed on October 17. Looking back, that extra month might have been a good thing after all; as the neck was now sufficiently straight to be reused.
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| No More Back Bow |
The next step was to thoroughly clean the grimy rosewood fretboard and frets. As luck would have it, the frets, though terribly tarnished and discolored, looked a whole lot better after a few rounds of steel wooling. They were also level enough to not warrant a fret dressing.
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| Fretboard and Frets After Cleaning |
The final task involving the neck was to repair the damaged nut slot. Here is a basic outline of the process employed. After sawing off the damaged slot wall, the end of the fretboard was sanded flat. This cleared a ledge on which to glue a strip of chengal, thereby creating a new nut slot. Of course, there was also a lot of reshaping and fine tuning carried out, but I won't bore you with the details.
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| Damaged Slot Wall Sawn Off |
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| Chengal Strip |
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| New Nut Slot Created |
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| Chengal Strip After Final Shaping |
Moving on to the electronics, only the P-style split pickup was retained. It was working initially, but suddenly went dead. Turned out that the lead connecting the two pickup halves had snapped off completely. To ensure this would never happen again, all three leads were replaced.
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| New Electronics and Wiring |
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| Pickup, Volume and Tone Pots |
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| Bridge Ground |
Yes, folks, we were now into the home stretch. However, before reattaching the neck, restringing and final setup, a number of things needed to be done. This included installing a new nut, control knobs, bridge and tuners; as well as conditioning the fretboard with lemon oil. The rosewood fretboard was so dry that it took two applications of the oil to hydrate it sufficiently.
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| New Bridge Installed |
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| New Tuners Installed |
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| After Final Setup |
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| Reconditioned Fretboard |
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| Headstock Face |
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| Close-Up of New Nut |
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