Official Luthiers Forum!

I bought three flat-sawn hard maple boards from Bell Forrest online. Their dimensions are: 1-3/16" x 4-1/2" x 36" and they are sold as "Instrument grade" neck blanks. They arrived, and I am very pleased with their grain pattern, their lack of blemishes or knots, and pretty much everything about them.

However... I am a newbie to neck making, so I am a little paranoid, and possibly overthinking things. The boards were obviously run over a jointer and planed into perfect S4S squareness. But when I stack the three boards up and turn them on their side, as I will be doing when I glue the three boards together to create the three-board lamination... they are not 100% dead-on flat against each other. They are not twisted, or bowed to any bad degree. But unless I grab the stack with my hand and squeeze the boards together with some light pressure, there are a couple of places where I could maybe slip a business card between the boards.

I know that if I glob on the Tite Bond, bust out my cauls, and clamp these suckers together, they will close up and form a solid board. But I don't want to be gluing in known tension into the neck. I don't know if such a small amount of "tension" would even register or make a difference. I can imagine that if I ran the boards back across a jointer, and planned em all back into an absolute zero-micron tolerance machinist-grade flatness... by tomorrow out in my shop they would move just a little again, and not be perfect. But... again, I am a newbie.

Can any of you guys with more woodworking and building experience tell me if it would be foolish for me to glue these boards up with a tiny bit of not-flat'ness, or is it probably fine, and you will never get three boards to remain dead flat against each other for more than a couple of days considering ambient conditions?

Thanks for your help all!

A little bit of open joint is acceptable if it will close up with a bit of clamping pressure. However, they need to be freshly jointed if you want the joints to survive long term.

What Barry said. I wouldn't worry about the small amount of stress that would be induced by closing up gaps that are as small as you say but I would want to know that the gluing surfaces were freshly prepared to get the best glue joint possible. Who knows when those boards were jointed, there certainly is some degree of oxidation on the surface and perhaps other contaminants that you can't see. I would scrape, joint or sand the surface before gluing.

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Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.