Some Peghead Work

Now that the inlay is in Rick's tenor I can continue to work on the peghead  for it and the parlour..

First the overlay gets glued to the peghead. Then the peghead shape gets cut out.. There are a number of ways to do this and in fact for these two guitars I used two different ways. For the Parlour I traced the shape of the template on to the peghead and cut close to the line with a band saw. Then I attached a template to the top of the peghead and used a template sanding drum in a drill press to sand away the excess. Works just fine.

On Rick's I used a template "router" in a drill press.. Which is in fact just a piece of tool steel with the end sharpened (filed) at about 35 degrees and run in a drill press as fast as the drill press will run. With this method the template is attached to the back of the peghead.

For the peghead shape I used on this tenor  this method is really not required, the sander method will work just fine but for more elaborate pegheads like those found on classical guitars this is a great way to do things and it is very safe. The only drawback is you need to make multiple passes around the peghead as you can only take small bites with this method..

Some people use a regular router for this as well but for me too many things can go wrong, especially routing across the end grain of the peghead.

Drill press "router" setup

and the result

After this was done I cut the slots in the Parlour's peghead for the tuners, its a slot head design, my first one. To do this I used the LMI slotting jig and it worked out perfectly.

LMI jig set up to drill tuner holes

Flipped over to route the slot

Completed, back view

And front with a tuner test fitted

The fretboard end of the slots still need a ramp filed in them, but I'll do that another day.