Gluing Acoustic Guitar Neck to Body - Regal Tenor Neck Reset Continues

In the last post I mentioned that I'll clean up the gap in the joint between the neck heel and the body of the guitar.

The way to do this is with a narrow piece of sandpaper.  In the past, I've cut strips from a regular sheet of paper.  Which works fine, but the paper tears easily.  So this time I'm using cloth-backed 120 grit paper, which is pretty tough and doesn't tear.

Hold the neck down to the guitar and pull the paper through.  It really just takes a few pulls and the heel will assume the shape of the body.

Here's one side.  Looks pretty good.

The other side looks the same.

This is where having a good fit on the dovetail pays off.

I restrung the guitar and brought it up to pitch - in this case it's CGDA tenor tuning.

The dovetail will stay in place so you can tune the guitar.  If you whack the joint, yes, it will come apart.

I did this to check the set.  As you can see, it's really close.

I probably could have left it, but I went ahead and took a touch (.011") off the heel so it lined up perfectly.

I forgot to take pictures of the re-re-test.  Sorry.

Now to reglue the neck on the guitar.

I scraped the surface under the fingerboard extension to get a 'fresh' wood surface for the glue to adhere to, and I did the same on the guitar body where the extension will be glued down.

I have this rectangular caul which is ideal to put inside the body parallel to the brace that runs just above the soundhole.  I'll use that as a spot to clamp the fingerboard extension down...that will be clearer in a minute.

I don't always heat up the mating parts, but in this case, where the areas to be glued are fairly large, I do heat them up.

Just a regular heat gun pointed at the dovetail and fingerboard extension area enough to warm them up and give a little more working time for the hide glue.  The glue is heated to about 140°F (60°C), and begins to gel at about 90°F (32.2°C), so we have a couple minutes maximum to work with.

Brush the glue onto the body, and just on the sides of the dovetail.  We don't need glue on the 'cheeks' of the neck.  Only those sides of the mating parts of the dovetail.

We put the neck into place and clamp it down.

I had all of my cauls and clamps ready to go.  I do a dry run without glue so I can get the clamps adjusted closely to where they'll need to be to save time once the glue is applied.

The caul I showed above is inside the body and the two c-clamps are attached between it and a second caul on the fingerboard extension.   You may be able to see that the fingerboard extension caul has 'fret slots' cut out of it.  It's not critical, but does help get some clamping pressure right on the board rather than the frets. 

Then a bar clamp on that same fingerboard caul and a third caul under the heel/body joint.

There is some glue-squeeze out of the fingerboard-to-body joint, and I get most of that cleaned up now before it sets.  Just wipe off the excess with a damp towel.