The banjo neck part #1 - a catalogue of mistakes

Buoyed up by yesterdays scarf joint jig success and the cutting of the banjolele neck, I decided to start on the banjo neck.

First off, I made an "improvement" to the scarf joint jig. A problem with the previous one was that because the part that was cut off was unclamped, there was a bit of tear out. So I adapted the jig in order that I could clamp the workpiece in two places. Like this...

adapted scarf joint jig

Yeah, I know what you are thinking, "he's going to cut his clamps in half". There is clearance though.

clearance for the blade?

However, I made two downright stupid errors! The first, and most stupid error was that I placed the clamp nearest the blade the wrong side of the cut. Duh! And the second was that I shouldn't have cut all the way through the fence, because I ended up having to place a wedge in it to prevent the clamp squeezing it shut.

Anyway I did spot the second error before making the cut, but not the first one, and I made a right mess of the cut. Fortunately I was able to clean up both sides afterwards using the jig in it's original mode.

Once I'd done that, it was a very clean joint. But, I'd made yet another error. Somehow in allowing a bit extra in the length, I'd calculated where to start the scarf joint incorrectly which left the head to short. But after cursing a bit, and then thinking about it, it's going to work out just fine I think. I explain what I did, and how I'm going to resolve the issue in the part #2. Having convinced myself that I had a "get out of jail card" I went ahead and glued it up and took a bit more care over the clamping than I did with the banjolele neck. We will see how it looks tomorrow.

banjo neck clamped up

part #2

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