As I was leaving Peavey( the Leakesville guitar facility ) in 1999, the plant manager gave me a pallet of lumber...mostly cutoff pieces from the mfg. process. Among these were some cutoff from the Cirrus bass project that was just getting started. These neck blanks started off as a 4" X 3" five piece glue up....either maple/purpleheart or walnut/maple. We would then remove the "back" side of the neck blank...and the resulting pieces were part of that pallet of lumber.
I'd given almost all of them to my father in law...he was using them as mounts for some wood carving projects. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, he returned about twenty of them to me.....I measured them, and determined I could use them in my neck construction process.
Since I'd set up some pretty good QC at the Peavey plant, these things are very consistent regarding tolerances. By gluing a piece to the back side of the blanks...after running them across my jointer and planer....it appears I have enough blanks for a dozen or so necks.
Lumber conservation....I like it!!!
So I'm planning on a few "specials" with these "naturally aged" blanks....almost ten years old now....they are absolutely stable and should work great.
Here's a photo of the blanks....the maple blank is ready to carve; the bottom walnut blank shows how the glue up works...and the top blank is "as is" before processing.....
