Official Luthiers Forum!

I'm embarrassed to say that I just discovered this Resonator Forum after hanging around here for a few years.
I recently bought a damaged Johnson round neck metal body reso guitar. It had been dropped or fell off a stand and landed on it's head. It was cracked open right on the scarf joint.




The Johnson neck is repairable, but butt ugly, so I decided to make a fancy new neck with some exotic fingerboard and peghead wood, a lot of purfles, and some tasty inlays. I was all set to start laminating a multi-piece neck blank till someone on the Reso Hangout suggested I look at Bryan English's Custom Inlay site for reso neck blanks. So I went there and ordered a three piece neck blank with the stick already installed for only $125. It's being made this week. After I get the neck and start doing stuff to it, I'll post some progress photos.

I'm sure you know the drill - many resos are 25 inch scale but some of the Pac Rim imports are different - check carefully. Also some have neck sticks, some don't. Some are 12 fretters, some 14. Lastly, and very important to me as a player - some are wide and flat (1-3/4 or wider, 20 inch radius, which is what I prefer), some are skinny and round (1-11/16 and 16). Paddle or slot head too - but that is your choice.

It will be interesting to see how this works - I've got an old Duolian with the narrow rounded neck that I've thought of changing - post pictures and information.

(also, this would be a good time to change the cone if you haven't already)

The Johnson neck is a 14 fret 24.9 in. scale. I checked with Custom Inlay and the neck blank is a 14 fret 25 in. scale. No problem to match them up.
I Iike a wider finger board, so if the blank is narrow, I may be able to make the fingerboard a little wider. A fudge-factor can be built in to almost anything.

Sounds like it will work fine. Resos are kind of different since the saddle location is fixed - everything works back from there. Also, typically they do not have any compensation (that piece of glass on your finger is a wonderful intonator) but if you play a lot of fretted you may want to add a hair by moving the fretboard towards the nut slightly or the shorter scale might do that for you. It is possible to slant the biscuit, but not if you don't also move the f/b - if you just twist it the high E string will be getting shorter.

Yahoo! Hooray! Woohoo!

Custom Inlay shipped my neck blank and it will be in my hands tomorrow - Wednesday.
I'll post some photos with the old one so you can see what I have to do to fit it to the metal body.

Dan

The new neck came yesterday. I was surprised to find that the stick was not glued into the neck, but after some thought, I like it better that way. There are some things I need to do to the neck and not having the stick glued makes it easier.



And this is how the new stick compares to the Johnson stick.



Onward and upward.

I've recently gotten back to this project and am making progress. I got the stick glued into the neck and fitted to the body. It needed a couple of small blocks glued on so that the tail screw and the two well screwsheld the neck at the proper angle.



I added an EIR peg head overlay, cut the slots, and used my McKenzie inlay routing machine to do the inlay.



Then I slotted an EIR fingerboard blank, profiled it, bound it, inlaid the dots, fretted it, and glued it to the neck.



A little more work on thinning and shaping the neck, and it will be ready for some finish.

Looking good but I would seriously consider widening those slots. The ones on my El Trovador are very skinny and tough to restring and they are still wider than those.

Thanks for your suggestion, but last night I had the neck screwed on to the body and strung up to check the action before I start to put on the finish. And I had no problems with stringing.

Done, at last. With a lot of fiddling and setup, it's a good player. I like the look of it. I'll keep this one.

Well done!