Kevin sent me the neck with the tuner holes drilled, peghead bound and purfled and the CNC cut, outlined logo in place. I was all ready to start routing the cavity for the inlays when I realized I had neglected to take the truss rod cover into account. Many of the peghead inlays I do are either up higher, or are on instruments with the truss rod adjustment accessible from the opposite end of the neck. That’s no excuse, but now I was going to pay for being distracted.

I sat for about an hour and looked at the peghead with the inlay sitting on top of it, trying to visualize what steps were necessary to keep the lines of the inlay intact, and in what order to do everything. Having the inlay embedded in the truss rod cover still proud of the surface was a possibility but I didn’t want the outlines of the TRC to be visible. I had done an eagle shaped peghead on a banjo years ago where the outlines of the truss rod cover were borders of adjacent inlay pieces and the cover was flush with the surface of the peghead.

All you could see when it was done was the screw that held the cover in place. That time, however, I knew what to do during the design phase and didn’t have to reverse engineer the whole thing to make it work.

The first step was to clamp the inlay onto the peghead and scribe around the perimeter with an X-Acto blade. Then I rough sawed the parts that hung over the edges of the binding so I could accurately mark where the inlay would abut the purfling. This was accomplished with a compass with one pointed side and one longer dull side that went around the edge of the peghead while the point scribed the inlay at the edge of the purfling underneath.

Now I had to break the inlay plate apart where I wanted the outline of the TRC to be, so it wouldn’t interfere with the lines of the design. Part of Kevin’s traditional cover would still be exposed at the bottom, so I drew a centerline on the peghead and over the inlay to help line up the various elements. The ebony cover got its outline traced on a piece of holly, and then the inlay was positioned exactly where it would reside, and I penciled the rest of the cover shape from there. Here is the resulting cover outline.

From that point things got a little easier. I rough cut the outline and milled the underside to a workable thickness, workable being slightly thicker than the cover would be inlaid into the peghead. The inlays themselves are .04″ thick, so the cover had to end up thicker than that, in order to have something to glue the shell onto, butI had to keep it thin enough to pass over the top of the truss rod adjusting screw as well.

Then I did a final fit to the inlay

and routed the peghead so it would fit in there, and sanded it flush once it did. You’ll notice some slop with the fit here, but the inlay itself covers that.

All that’s left to do is inlay the main section of the design into the peghead and then inlay the rest into the TRC. The lettering on the right side was done before anything else here, because I didn’t want it to run under any tuner washers.

Rather than use a screw to hold it in place, Kevin is going to fashion something with small magnets underneath the cover.

The last thing that had to be done was engraving the faces and details.

Whoops - and clear out the tuner holes and final sand… seems like there’s always something more to do.

Speaking of which, here’s a shot of the rosette, which just got finished two weeks ago.

Obviously this guitar isn’t going to be finished in early 2009 like we had hoped, but it may be done in time for the Healdsburg Guitar Show in mid-August.