Date: August 27 2014 – Ridgewing #1 frames are fresh out of the mold, still shiny from the mold release agent (aerosolized Vaseline) with an inevitable few of those pesky voids showing, later to be filled with Bondo.

The neck has been finished out and joinery hardware installed, awaiting attachment of the fingerboard lying next to it.

This close-up shows how the noogies are installed in the neck, with their top surfaces being flush with the bottom surface of the fingerboard. A stainless steel cross-pin holds them in place, which can be knocked out from the side if the noogies need to be removed or replaced.

Just the very end of the self-tuning headstock is showing on the left, with the end of the original carbon-fiber push rod showing. The push rod is operated by the side-mounted string tensioning lever, the end tab of which is visible just above it, and controls the width of the gap between the headstock and the neck. The two headstock mounting dowels haven’t been installed in the headstock yet. When this guitar was first strung up a couple of months later, this carbon-fiber push rod ended up collapsing from the compression of all the string tension being focused on it. To fix the problem, the pushrod was replaced sequentially with aluminum, then titanium, then steel, and finally hard steel before the dowel’s tip was hard enough and the mechanism stabilized.

The brass neck cap holding the end of the neck together has been installed, and the brass sleeves that accept the carbon-fiber headstock-mounting dowels have been installed. There is a lot going on here at the end of the neck, and it is a very tight fit getting all the necessary components in place. The top edge of the dowel sleeves have been ground down level with the bottom of the fingerboard to pick up  five or six millimeters of effective dowel length, and the headstock dowels will have their ends ground down to fit and take advantage of this taper, as every available millimeter of sleeve length adds strength to the headstock joint. This may constitute over-engineering, but I am haunted by the original Chrysalis guitar neck design, which had no neck cap or brass dowel sleeves, having failed on Harvey Reid’s early Chrysalis in the middle of a performance, with the end of the neck just splitting open from the torque of the headstock dowels. The current design represents just about all than could be done to prevent this from ever happening again. The final configuration works extremely well, and I have been able to sleep better since then.