The Neck Complete!

The neck came in two weeks ahead of schedule!  I was bummed at the four-week mark after ordering that it would take at least another month to come in—they corrected me and said that a custom order with a lacquer coat would take 8-10 weeks—but it got shipped to my house right at six weeks.  My best guess is that August is traditionally the slowest time of the year for most businesses, especially retail; I could/would have got lucky with timing.  Warmoth would have had more time to work on it and ship it sooner.

Having never done anything like this before, needless to say, I was a little bit nervous about how it would turn out.  Trusting Warmoth's judgment with the specific planks of 3A birdseye maple they would use was one of the things that concerned me, as well as well what the gloss coat would look like on the finished product.  Would I be satisfied?

Yes.

The CBS headstock!  Definitely putting a custom logo on it at some point.  The two holes drilled at the nut area are the Floyd Rose neck prep.  "R3" denoted.  No lacquer there for better contact with the nut when I install it.

Tuning peg holes drilled for Schaller machine heads.

Gorgeous and evenly-spaced birdseye maple!  And that gloss coat is smooooooooth.

The birdseye looks even deeper and more rich on the fretboard than the back of the neck.  Black dot inlays are simple.  Definitely the right choice.

This is the truss rod system.  The allen key hole on the left is the main adjuster, obviously unavailable when bolted on the body.  The allen key hole on the right is for smaller adjustments.  The directions specify to leave as much slack (and natural underbow) in the truss rod as possible while the neck is not strung up; otherwise, the neck can wind up permanently back-bowed.  Then you wind it up before install.  I'm so thankful to not have to deal with truss rod adjustments behind the nut!

The one thing that I might possibly be miffed about is the fret size.  The stainless steel SS6150 frets are finely inlaid, but when I specified "jumbo" I was thinking of the jumbo frets on my Jackson Soloist, which are wider.  It's alright, though.  The fret height is about the same give or take a few thousandths of an inch, and the scale length is exactly the same.  These steel frets should last me a good long time.  With that being said, though, I should have done just a little more research on the size.  The frets still have lacquer on them left over from the finishing process.  I will look into the proper way to clean them up (steel wool, probably) and dress them.

After the failures of my previous post, I'm excited for this project all over again!

No rhyme or reason, I just like this song: