Practice cutting dovetails by hand

[Jonathan Ward]

My personal favorite rural directions story goes back to serving on a fire department in the far western North Carolina mountains 30 years ago. One night the official location of the call dispatch was "third trailer on the left below Herbert Buckner's mother's house." Outside of Herbert and his mother, nobody had any idea where that was.

[belbein]

I grew up in Texas, in San Antonio, Houston and Austin. They were all relatively mobile places. People didn't live in their houses or neighborhoods for a long time; everyone was in and out in a few years. So when I came to a very stable neighborhood in Atlanta, I couldn't figure out what was going on when people would refer to houses as "The Golding's house," "The Smith's house," "the Widow's house ..." and all those people were gone. Joneses lived in the Goldings house; Burtons lived in the Smith's house; a newly married couple from New Jersey lived in the Widow's house. It was bizarre. Then I realized that there was this kind of assumption about the attachment of people to property ... and persistence of the community and peoples' part in it even after they were gone.

[sunburst]

My Dad always said things like "just past the old Jim Stull house".
Jim Stull hadn't lived there in my lifetime... the house wasn't even there anymore! Somehow, I was expected to know where he was talking about.
...or "the second ford of Swanson's Branch". There had been bridges there far longer than I had been alive, and who knew what Swanson's Branch was anyway!

Maybe we need directions to steer this thread back toward dovetails...

[soliver]

My wife said her Grandfather told her to turn left at the cup tree to get to his home on lake of the Ozarks... which was apparently a stumped tree with a bunch of coffee mugs hung from it (imagine that).

[belbein]

My wife said her Grandfather told her to turn left at the cup tree to get to his home on lake of the Ozarks... which was apparently a stumped tree with a bunch of coffee mugs hung from it (imagine that).

Man. You must'a grow'd up rich if your neighborhood had cups not beer bottles hanging on the tree!

[Marty Jacobson]

Man. You must'a grow'd up rich if your neighborhood had cups not beer bottles hanging on the tree!

....and the little streams of whiskey.. come a'tricklin' round the rocks....

[hank]

Good Morning Mandolin Cafer’s! After a cup of coffee and going thru Adrian’s fantastic photo instructional I’m left needing a deeper understanding of Lloyd’s neck shift. The two lines that intersect under the bridge from the centerline and the side shift mark is confusing to me. Are you shifting the dovetails location on the body but not the yaw axis or actually changing the yaw axis to correspond with the intersection under the bridge? Does your centerline shift over to the dovetails new centerline?

[HoGo]

I didn't go into details about the "offset" neck as that was not OP question. But here it is...
After I make draw the small templates (before I cut them out) I align them on my body template that has both centerlines as shown in my drawings (see attached snippet)
and draw the fingerboard (neck) centerline on the cardboard as well. WHen I transfer the template on neck I use the fingerboard/neck centerline both on top of neck and on underside of heel as well to align the template
The body centerline is, well, centerline and curve at the juncture of body and neck is pretty much symmetric. Gibson was machining the dovetails in necks with shaped cutter so they wanted it symmetric so they could cut both sides of dovetail with the same cutter.
They moved the centerline of fingerboard a bit to scroll side (I tend to call it centerline of neck, but the heel is then centered) but if you don't want the bridge moved that way you need the centerline of fingerboard to angle towards center of top so it diverges tiny bit as it goes out of the body. the angle is so small that you can safely use parallel line and do the angle duiring the final chalk fitting. I used to eyeball it and just rotate one end of the template by thickness of pencil line...
I mark both of them on the crosspiece and on the pic of fitted neck you can see thay both are aligned.
I also forgot to mention that on standard F-5 with one piece neck it is simple as you can shape the heel after the neck is fitted to match the button. But on F-4's with black centerstrip (that was actually quite shallow inlay!, often barely covered by the button binding, rarely they used three piece wood sandwich, perhaps only on few early F-5's) that should join the heel at its centerline thay had to count with that before they cut the dovetail in necks so that the position is precise.
I hope this helps.

[hank]

Thank you Adrian. I’m making note of the terminology correction from “shifted neck” To “offset neck”. The small yaw change to bring alignment of the strings over the bridge and into a reasonably centered tailpiece is made during the final dovetail tweaking. The right angle of the back of the dovetail is in harmony with the offset mark not the centerline’s 90 degree plane. I hadn’t noticed many of the 1923 F4 neck attachment details on my Mandolin until you them pointed out to me. Thank you for sharing your one pointed focus on this design. I’ve found the Devil can most certainly be found in the details.