Winter Build Off 2026 - Wandre Transonic inspired headless

[MoleSandwich]

I've rented a compressor and fired up the deep hole drilling jig today.

I decided to place an emergency button at close reach to stop the lathe of needed.

I placed the neck blank inside the tube, placed the dust collector / chip box against the neck blank, attached the vacuum cleaner hoze, opened the air pressure valve, started the lathe at half of the motor speed and pushing the gundrill in the neck blank while backing of the drill a bit each 50 - 60 mm. Not sure if this was really needed.

The hole drilled completely through the neck blank and the hole seems straight and the diameter seems to be around 13,1 - 13,2 mm, so hopefully a good fit for for the homemade 13mm truss rod. I have to order the rod now I know the setup worked.

 

[MoleSandwich]

Received the rods, seems a very tight fit. Kinda tempted to use it as a non-adjustable truss rod but I really want to test the concept of the circular adjustable truss rod.

Since I now have two neck blanks, I need a fret slotting and radius jig for the fretboard.

On to the fret slotting setup; I ordered a circular fret slotting saw and some spacer rings to fit on my Emcostar multi machine.

I cut a fret slotting jig using some leftover woods and a piece of 2mm aluminium bar to act as a indexing 'pin'. The 2mm pin I received with my fret slotting ruler did not fit at all (I think it was just a piece of 2mm rod cut off with some pliera and deformed badly).

I did a test run on a random piece of pine and it seems to work very well.

I initially bought the Emcostar mainly for the sanding disc and bandsaw, but to be uonoust the bandsaw part is not very good. The wheels are to small and it is very difficult to set it right. The sanding disc however gets lots of use. I rebuild the lathe part to a thickness sander which is used a lot too.

 

[MoleSandwich]

I made a very simple stop for the fret cutting sled to make the cutting even more simple;