I liked the feel of the neck on my Yamaha Pacifica, but I was always having problems with buzzing on certain frets. Although I could have fixed the original neck, I felt this was a good opportunity to try building one from scratch. This neck went through two iterations. The first one had a Pacifica-shaped headstock and a compound-radius fingerboard. Later, I reshaped the headstock, removed the fingerboard radius, added a zero fret, and refretted it with stainless steel fretwire.
The first thing I did was build a test neck. Then I cut it into pieces to check the clearances.
Neck and fingerboard blanks
Routing the truss rod channel
Cutting out and routing to shape
Headstock
Gluing on the fretboard
Installing the side dots
Cutting the taper with my Safe-T-Planer
Carving the neck
Fretting
This is how the neck stayed for about 2 years. I was fairly happy with it, but I eventually got the urge to try something new.
Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the work in progress. I reshaped the headstock, flattened the fingerboard radius, added a zero fret, installed stainless steel fretwire, and refinished the neck in semi-gloss polyurethane.
