Ash & Mulberry Tele Necks

Recently we acquired a reasonably large assortment of Ash and Mulberry logs. I was curious to see how these woods would work out as neck woods, and hold up under string tension. Both woods (especially Ash) are great tonewoods for guitar bodies, so why not necks? Let’s find out.

Started out with a piece of ash (pictured on the left), and one piece of mulberry (right).

One quick thing to mention here: this is what the mulberry looks like after it’s been exposed to UV radiation, aka sunlight. When it’s freshly cut, it’s a much lighter greenish-yellow color, and this darkening process could take years, especially when taking into consideration the UV-blocker that’s built into the finish that we use. Exactly how long it’ll take to darken, as well as the exact tonal properties of the wood, is unknown. Hence the experimental nature of these necks.

The neck stock, fresh out of the planer, and now three of the sides are perfectly flat, straight, true, and square relative to one another.

At this point, both pieces of stock are milled to 3/4" and the fingerboards have been resawed off of of their respective pieces, and planed down to 1/4".

A better shot of the fingerboards. Both are slotted to a 25.5" (Fender) scale length.

The trussrod slots routed, and ready to have the fingerboards glued on.

Since the stock was cut at 3" wide, a small piece of wood had to be grafted onto the bottom of the headstock. This is a common practice among guitar builders, and if done correctly, is of little to no consequence to the overall tone and cosmetics of the instrument.

Headstock grafts and fretboards are glued, with the trussrod in place underneath.

Now the headstocks need to be thicknessed down to 9/16", with a slope starting just past the nut and ending just before the low E-string tuner hole. I roughed it in with a chisel, then finished it by clamping a 4x4 table to the spindle sander, and using the biggest sanding drum, which is between 3" and 4".

With the headstock thicknessed and rough-cut to shape, the next step was to use a flush-cut bearing router bit, riding along the edge of the fretboard to trim up the sides of the neck to exactly the width of the fretboard. As you can see, it’s starting to take shape.

By now, I finally broke down and made a template to expedite the rest of the neck building process. It was rather time consuming to make out of MDF, but ultimately worth it by the time saved on future necks. Pictured above the template is the donor neck that I was lent, in order to clone for the new necks. This saves so much time, since it’s just a matter of lining up the template to the nut slot, after the fingerboard is slotted and glued, then sticking the template onto the neck stock and routing everything flush, using the template as a guide.

This is the mulberry neck, displaying excellent results from the use of the template.

Moving on to carving the neck. As always, roughing it in, setting benchmarks, then connecting those benchmarks.

Thumb-style ebony inlays are installed and fingerboard radiused to a 12" radius.

And now a note about the ash neck: There was a minor incident with our new bandsaw’s table not being secured properly, and the blade drifted while cutting out the slope for the headstock. As a result, the headstock was cut at 1/8" too small of a thickness, and I attempted to save it by gluing a maple headcap. This was definitely less than ideal, not to mention the ugly wormhole in the fretboard at the 15th fret. This was the point where I went home, thought about it, then came in the next day and put the ash neck into the woodchipper. It’s now doing a wonderful job being used as mulch for some lovely outdoor shrubbery. I ended up remaking the ash neck, using a slightly different methodology than before.

As for the mulberry neck, it’s on to the finishing stage. A couple coats of shellac, then Crystallac Brite-Tone.

This is the 2nd edition of the ash neck. Despite both necks being cut from the same ash billet, this one is a lot better looking, with red mineral marks. For this one I went with a 1-piece construction, meaning that there would be no glue joint between the fingerboard, and the trussrod will be installed from the back of the neck, and plugged with a skunk stripe. In the above picture, the top of the neck has been slotted and the neck rough-cut to within a 1/16" of the final shape.

Again the ash neck, this pic was taken before the final router pass with the template.

After the neck is routed to shape, bubinga oversized 3/8" inlays are drilled in, and the top of the neck (fingerboard area) is radiused to 12".

Matching the inlays, a piece of bubinga is also installed as the skunk stripe, and carving commences once the glue is dry.

Neck is almost done, then the volute and heel area are carved.

Once the back of the neck is done, the entire piece is sanded to 220-grit and finished the same as the mulberry neck.

By now, it is a few days later and the mulberry neck has enough coats of finish applied, and is ready for level sanding, buffing, and fretwire. Here you can see the neck is buffed, and frets installed.

Since the fretboard is finished (and glossy), it must be taped completely before going any further, to protect the board while performing levelling, crowning, and polishing of the frets.

Mulberry neck is good to go, and ready for installation on the body.

Customer provided a pine body, with Seymour Duncan pickups and half-pickguard. Guitar is now done, and now back to the ash neck.

Installing the fretwire – which in this case is the StewMac #0148 nickel/silver wire. Pretty standard stuff.

Fretwire is in. Taping off the fretboard to protect finish during the fret-levelling process.

Now that the frets are levelled, crowned, and polished, it’s time to install the nut and tuners.

Also checking the fit in the neck pocket, holes drilled and neck mounted.

Everything seems to look good. At this point, it’s like a normal assembly+setup job.

It seems that the only logical choice for body wood is to use an ash body. The bridge is chrome-plated brass, and pickups are Joe Barden Modern T’s.

Tonally speaking, as a neck wood ash seems to resonate much more than maple. At the time of writing, this neck has been strung up for a week with stable results, but ultimately time will tell how it compares to maple. [My prediction is that it will be fine under long-term string tension.] From a guitar builder point of view, ash is easier to work with than maple, due to its straighter grain with less grain reversal – as flaming (or figure in general) is much more common in the maple stock that we have available. It also seems to be slightly lighter than maple, but this isn’t very noticeable, comparatively speaking.

As an aside, I have never seen ash quite like this – with “mottled” splashes of red. I was very impressed with the look, feel and sound of this ash neck experiment, and will definitely be making more of these going forward.

In general, mulberry seems like a much harder wood (judging from how badly the saw was struggling to cut it), however I’m not exactly sure how it’ll fare in the long run, in terms of warping. Also, there’s the color issue. Mulberry will turn from green to brown – the only question is how long will it take. We shall see.