Hey baby, where you been?

I've been right here, fool!

For the last couple of months I've been giving the guitar body on this build all the love.  What about the neck?  I guess it's time to see where we're at.

I bought this neck from Warmoth soon after I started this build - back in 2010.
It was then (and is now) ridiculously expensive.  I would never spend that much on a neck ever again.  But at the time - it made sense.  I was unsure of my abilities as a builder and had precious little experience.  Plus, the mechanics of a twelve string seemed to be overwhelming.
How strong did it need to be to carry the strain of twelve guitar strings tuned to pitch?  I had no idea.

Waiting on your sorry ass...

So, I bought the neck and other than installing the tuning keys and putting a finish on it - it needed nothing.  That certainly is one upside.  The build for this was done by professionals - so it looks good and it functions well.  No arguments there.  But I did want to personalize it a bit.  And of course that's where I got into trouble.  Back in 2010 I added the black stripe and the Irish 5 penny coin..  I was new to these things and as such - it didn't go as well as I would have liked.  Knowing what I know now I would do things a little different.but since fixing these errors would take a looooong time and I'm not sure the coin could be fixed (it's epoxied in there) I'm going to move forward and accept that the headstock won't be perfect.

...to finish what you started.

So, what are we doing?  I'm adding some color to the face of the headstock.  The neck is made of maple (the fingerboard is ebony) which is the same wood as the guitar top.  The difference is that the maple of the body is figured/flamed and the neck is not.  Also, the neck is quarter-sawn wood whereas the guitar top is plain-sawn wood, and finally, the two maples were of different colors - as happens when taking wood from two different trees.  So, my goal is not to match the two woods but rather put them in the same ballpark (I'd be happy with the same zip codes to be honest).

Shellac in esse

To put the headstock in the same color palate I needed to dye the headstock with the same dye and also use shellac.  It became clear to me that the shellac added a lot to the color.  So, I mixed up a small batch of dye and shellac.  You may have noticed in the above photos that I also taped up the neck and filled the tuning peg holes with paper towels to keep the dye/shellac to one area - the face of the headstock.  I'm going to spray the whole neck with nitrocellulose lacquer but I just want color on the face.

Shellac in potentia

I tried to grind up the shellac flakes as fine as I could - to minimize the time it took to dissolve in alcohol but there is no substitute for making this stuff 8 to 12 hours ahead of time.  Next time I will do so.  One other thing that you can't see here is that I added a little dye directly to the shellac to darken it up.  It worked a bit to deepen the color of the shellac - which was good as the neck didn't soak the dye up like the guitar top did.

Wad

Wet

Repeat

After a few coats of dye and about four coats of shellac I was left with...

Whatcha gonna do now?

A slightly brown face.  And all of my mistakes highlighted by the dye.  Oh, goody!
In these last few pictures you can see where my chisel slipped, where the black strip was chipped, and basically everything that isn't quite right.  Ah well...

1970 Irish 5 penny coin

To help things out I used some pore filler to even out the rough spots.  As I wait for that to dry I'll do some soul searching to see if I want to try fixing some of these "beauty marks."

Hmmm...