Guitar restoration - Part 4 - Preparing the neck

As mentioned earlier, I have removed the neck from the body and the frets from the neck previously, so it was time to work on the guitar neck. Except for the usefulness of having a convex radius, after the body finish being sanded down, the neck looked out of the place with its natural aging, and probably would also be the same after finishing, so yet another reason to reshape the neck.



This is usually done with a sanding block, which obviously (as most of the tools required) are not available in my town, and in the country, so I had two options, either wait weeks for an order to arrive, or do it the DIY way. After seeing several methods on how to do a sanding block, but all of them being complicated and needing special tools, I came up with my own method (or at least something I didn't see anywhere else). I took something round (more exactly a strong 10l metallic paint bucket)  with a radius (26 cm ~=10.2 inches) approximately matching the 10 inch radius I needed, glued some 60 grit sandpaper to the side all the way around, right at the bottom, so that the bottom edge of the bucket stopped the sandpaper from slipping (the edge was approximately the same thickness as the sandpaper), and hand-pressed it until the superglue hardened. I took the sanding block wannabe wood piece (some leftover wood, a 1-2 cm wider than the fretboard at its wide end) and started sanding the end-grain part of it (the side with the nice rings visible) on the bucket with the sandpaper on it. I was cautious to sand mostly perpendicular to the bottom of the bucket, and after lot of sanding this resulted in a nice arched wooden block. Then glued some sandpaper (120 grit) to it, and started working on the neck. This meand moving along the neck, and as the aged fretboard wood was disappearing, it was absolutely clear where to sand more, where to sand less, and how uniform the sanding is. Given that the fretboard was the deepest at the center, the goal was to have this inverted, meaning that even the deepest point is sanded, meaning the color is also fresh, like the sides.

Sanding in progress, making sure to have both side equally sanded

The end-result, with all the fretboard sanded

I like the result, it looks nice and shiny, and matches the top now. After sanding the fretboard, the only thing on the front to sand is the headstock, but that should also be reshaped (although I'm starting to get used to the simple rectangular shape, my wife can't stand it, and a challenge is a challenge regardless of the reasons). But that will happen later on.