floating tenon

[phavriluk]

I think I'm missing something. There's lots of comment surrounding the tooling and techniques to use to cut an accurate tenon on a bolt-on guitar neck. I, too, scratched my head a fair bit, and then I came up with a process that created accurate neck faces at the heel and a reinforced neck heel:

Use a 'floating tenon', a tenon fabricated separately and glued into a mortise in the neck at the right time. . Leave the neck blank square, i.e., the heel block is the full width of the neck. Cut the neck angle on a table saw. Run the neck through a router table to cut a slot for a floating tenon which will be glued into the slot in the neck. Run the neck block through the same router table to create the mortise. Make up the floating tenon with your friend the table saw. Before gluing anything to anything, slip the floating tenon into the neck block and match-drill for the mounting bolts. At the end of the day a table saw, a router table, and a drill press create a reinforced neck with all the drilling done and the heel reinforced with the vertical-grain floating tenon. No extra tooling. And the neck block mortise is routed and match-drilled to the tenon.

So what's wrong with this?

Thanks!

[Diane Kauffmds]

Absolutely nothing is wrong with it. I ran into a floating tenon in an older 1979 Martin Sigma. I did a neck reset, but that's normal for a 40+ year old instrument.