Guitar build, spanish heel

This past week I worked on getting the spanish heel cut in the guitar. Unlike steel-string guitars (or what most perceive as the standard acoustic guitar) that have dovetail joints (again, most have dovetail joints where the neck meets the body), classical guitars join to the body at what is called the spanish heel. I employed the assistance of Dave, the father-in-law, and several of his tools to complete this task.

In order to cut the slots in the heel for the sides, Dave and I first had to square up the heel block. We did that on the disc sander.

Looks pretty good to me!

Then we had to mark the center of the neck, and the depth mark for the slots we were going to cut.

After all that, we spent a whopping amount of time truing up and squaring up the table saw. I am not ready to admit how long it took us, but needless to say we got it as close as we possibly could.

To keep the spacing the same for both cuts, we used a piece of scrap wood to act as a sort of spacer between the fence and the neck. It may be hard to visualize how that all works together, but these images should give you some idea.

And here is the result.