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The neck now has to be fit to the body; this will be done using the traditional Fender-esque bolt-on technique in which the neck is not actually bolted on to the body, but instead screwed in place from the back of the body.
A pocket is made in the guitar body that fits the neck’s heel perfectly so the neck is practically part of the guitar body. Another common method is a glued-on neck, used by Gibson type electric guitar manufacturers and most acoustic guitars. Both methods work well, despite what extremists from either camp will tell you.
So we want the pocket to be as close to the exact dimensions as the neck’s heel, and also we need to make sure that the pocket is the right depth, and also at the right angle to the body. This latter consideration is easy to determine – with bolt-on flat body guitars, the neck is almost always mounted parallel to the guitar’s face. This leaves us only to figure out the correct pocket depth.
In the above stolen pic, ‘n’ is the thickness of the neck, from the bottom of the heel to the top of the fret. ‘a’ is the desired height of the strings above the frets. ‘b’ is the height of your bridge above the guitar’s deck (this is adjustable, so you use the mid-point of its adjustment). So, simple math gives us the pocket depth.
Cutting out the pocket is easy; you can use a router to cut away everything you don’t want, and with the router bit set to the correct pocket depth, well, Bob’s your uncle! We use the actual neck itself to rig up a router guide – this is done by placing straight edged guides on either side of the neck like so:
Here, they are properly in place and screwed down. I can get way with the screw holes as I will eventually be covering the body with the particleboard, if you recall.
Lining up the neck before this was fun; I was able to use a laser (oooh…laser….) to ensure that the neck is perfectly in line with the body’s center line:
I add another block up against the heel of the neck:
Then I pull out the neck from the blocks and add a layer or two of masking tape along the inside of the blocks. Why do that? well, this will make the pocket a wee bit smaller when the flush-trim router bit follows the inside of the blocks. I want the neck to be snug in the pocket, and this works great to ensure it. If it’s too tight, I can always remove a layer of tape and re-route. And route I do!
Pocket routed, I test fit the neck (fit nice) and check against the bridge for correct height. Things were a little more complicated than previously described, as the guitar will eventually have a 3mm thick pressboard top face glued down, so the bridge will – or might not – actually sit higher than shown here. And this is where I made a change, as this bridge is so tall that the neck pocket ends up pretty shallow. That, or the bridge has to be recessed into the body cavity, which is actually what Danelectro is doing with their newer guitars. I don’t like that added complication, and honestly wasn’t thrilled with the quality of the eBay-sourced bridge shown above, so I decided to upgrade to a much better Schaller branded bridge that sits lower on the body, is much more solid and has better adjustments. This allowed me to re-route the pocket a little deeper as well, which made for a good solid fit to the body.
That done, I measured out where the bridge should sit, finalized the locations for the pickups, then routed the slots for them and drilled out the mounting holes.
That pretty well did it for the internals of the body, so I grabbed one of the body panels I bandsawed into shape way back in…late March? Yikes. Anyhoo, I glue this to the back of the body using some old cement blocks in lieu of too many clamps…
A few days later, the new bridge arrives in the mail so I can verify the pickups and bridge locations before gluing up the top panel…
FYI, the black paint there is in case i decide to add an f-hole to the front of the guitar later on (more on that later, should I decide to add an f-hole to the front of the guitar later…).
All looks good, so I remember to drill the pickup holes down through the back of the guitar’s pressboard back (these pickups are adjusted from back there), and apply liberal amounts of glue.
This time, not too many clamps are used to get the top panel glued into place.
This of course covers over the newly-routed neck pocket, but another quick pass with the appropriate router trim bit cuts out that for me. That done, I can test fit the neck to the covered body and holy cow things are beginning to look like a guitar!
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