Gluing Neck on Guild F50

After a week of fine-tuning and generally fiddling about with the shims on the dovetail, I'm ready to glue the neck back onto the Guild F50.

Here's why I had a week's worth of fiddling:  I needed to get the heel to sit as far down in the dovetail as it did originally.  Since the lacquer on the binding has yellowed, it's easy to see where it was originally seated.  And I kept scraping away on the shims in an effort to get it all the way down into the pocket.  But I couldn't quite get it to seat all the way. 

Problem was, I took so much material off that it still didn't sit all the way down, but yet the neck was now loose in the joint.  Doh.

So I put a couple of new shims on, and trimmed them - and got the neck to sit within a millimeter or so of where it should be.  And while doing this it occurred to me that when I removed the neck, I used a fair amount of pressure on the neck jig and suddenly the neck just popped out of the dovetail.  Perhaps I needed to put some pressure on the joint now?

I clamped it up with a bar clamp and with a small amount of pressure, the neck went all the way down.  Success!  And it was darn tight to boot.

Now I'm ready to glue the thing up.  Finally.

I did a small amount of fitting the joint between the heel and the body.  You've seen this before - I use some sign-painter's tape on the body to protect it.  Then hold the neck firmly in place, put some sandpaper in the joint, and then pull it out.  This makes the heel take on the shape of the body curve.

Now we can glue it in place.  I spread hot hide glue on the mating surfaces of the dovetail - on both the body and the neck .  Unlike the way the Guild factory did this originally, I don't put glue on the large face of the dovetail.

Then clamp it up.  I only need one clamp here - since I'll be attaching the fingerboard extension separately, we just need pressure on the joint itself.

I used my homebrew 12" radius fretboard caul and one of the cork-and-birch ply cauls I have for just this sort of operation.

Finally, finally, finally!  It actually looks like a guitar.