Neck gluing jig

I work with vintage and old guitars. The two most difficult things when doing this is gluing back the neck and the bottom. I have made jigs for both operations. Here is my neck gluing jig. It's foldable and can be stored hanging on a wall. It's made of birch planks (from an IKEA table!) and some bolts, washers and nuts. It's adjustable, I have glued necks on small parlors like this one but also a huge oversized 12 string jumbo dreadnought.

The big advantage with a jig is that the gluing is (almost) predictable. The "hits& misses" I had before is almost gone. I've made a small gizmo to keep track of the side-to-side matching of the neck using two G strings. With wedges at the nut of the neck I can make small last minute adjustments and lock the neck position. Sometimes the last tightening of the clamps when gluing for real can move the neck side-to-side, not so with a wedge secured neck. With a thin spring steel "ruler" I can make sure that the height at the bridge is right (I got my "ruler" from an old printers business using loose lead types).

It's even possible to string up the guitar with a loose neck in the jig and put string tension on it to check the actual string height at the bridge! I have done that a couple of times when the neck was not reinforced with a carbon rod and the neck itself was soft and bendable.

The jig is built around a long clamp. The pictures will tell the story.