Re: Neck finishing...
Last year I just finished two bodies and necks, and having never done it prior to that here are my thoughts.
-The ReRanch products and instructions are excellent.
-If the neck is all maple, I think you should definitely finish the entire thing, front and back. If you don't finish the fretboard you could potentially have problems. Don't worry about nitro on the frets, it comes off pretty easily with a fingernail or a metal nail, and it's kind of fun to scrape off (in a tedious way).
-Finishing in nitro is pretty easy, and if you use the ReRanch satin nitro, it feels like raw wood. Just DO NOT spray it on too thick, it's better to layer very light coats and let them build gradually. I had a little orange peel on my first neck from spraying coats that were too thick.
-I built a jig out of a 2x4 and a couple of dowels. Quite easy to do, just find a dowel that fits in the tuning machine holes, drill a hole in the 2x4 and run in through (cut it to about 8"). Then I got a small (maybe 1/4" diameter) metal plumbing pipe with an L joint and drilled a hole and mounted that to the other end of the 2x4. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but at the body end there is the plumbing pipe with the L (or T) joint and a short dowel running parallel to the 2x4. This goes up against the truss rod. At the headstock a dowel runs through a tuning machine hole. Hence the neck lays face up and you can spray all sides from all angles and let it dry. It worked like a charm. I'll try to get a picture, which will convey it better thatn my clumsy explanation.
-Here's a tip that really helped on neck #2. Go to the hardware store and buy some Plumber's Putty (it's cheap, like less than $5). It's kind of like Silly Putty. Fill the tuning machine holes with it. Make sure they're totally sealed, but that the putty doesn't stick out above the edge of the hole. Spray away. When you are finished, it pops right out. I didn't do this on the first neck, and while the tuning machines fit perfectly pre-finish suddenly they didn't because of finish inside the holes, which was a major pain to sand out
-If you want to make your own decal, go to a hobby shop and get some waterslide decal paper (for laser or inkjet) and go into Word and find a cool font. It took me several attempts on each guitar to get this right.
-While I finished the neck in satin nitro so it'd play like bare wood, I finished the headstock front and back in regular nitro so that it's really glossy and the decal sparkles.
-When you are finished, and the neck has cured for at least a few days, you need to sand it, but it's easy to do. I sanded the headstocks down to 2000 and buffed them to make them really shine.
Hope some of this helps, let me know if you have any questions!
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