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When final sanding the neck, how do you deal with the shoulder of the heel where it meets the body?
It's very easy to round over this area instead of keeping it "sharp".
And even more difficult to sand epoxy or level sand finish in this area without sand-through.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

When I sand there I wrap paper around a hard backer, usually a half inch aluminum rod. Sometimes other backers. And one of the reasons I don’t use export filler on the neck. I use oil based pore filler on the neck . Epoxy on the body.

A block or firm foam (rigid foam) block works both to avoid rounding over the contour and for sanding the epoxy filler. A longer block is easier to see the angle being worked...just maintain a few degrees beyond square to avoid issues.

Re: epoxy filler, it is particularly important to remove excess epoxy on complex contours because it is much more difficult to scrape the excess...it turns what can be a quick job on the flat to tedious on the round.

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For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan