Building a hot-mod guitar – pt 1 Simon Croft starts to assemble his modded guitar, starting with the seemingly easy task of bolting the neck, body and hardware together to make sure it’s all a good fit…
lthough this is by no means the first guitar I’ve assembled it’s still quite a challenging job compared to say, swapping a set of pickups. So I’m not going to rush it. After all, unless I end up with a guitar I really enjoy playing, it’s all been a waste, hasn’t it? To make sure this guitar is as good as I aim it to be, I’m going to ‘dry assemble’ it first. Then when I’m certain that everything fits, I’ll take it apart, spray the body and put it all back together again. This might seem a bit long-winded but it’s better than finishing the body, then realising there was still some woodwork to be done! As it happens, there was a very basic reason why these parts wouldn’t fit together without some work. The body was made in the US, the neck was made in Taiwan and the first time they met was on my workbench. Guess what? The neck was too big to go into the neck pocket of the body (Fig. 1)! To be fair, neither of them are officially Fender licenced parts, so there was never any guarantee that they would be an exact match when it came to the dimensions.
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If the neck had been loose in the body’s pocket, I’d have chosen a different neck because a strong neck join is so important to tuning stability, as well as tone and sustain. So I’m actually fortunate that the neck pocket was too small (Fig. 2)! Normally, when people ask me whether they
should reshape the body or the neck to get a good fit, I say the body. The neck was designed to be a certain width and so this is reflected in its profile and the width of the fingerboard. If you try to slim the heel, you can end up with a neck that still doesn’t fit very well but is almost impossible to sell if you decide to upgrade. For this project, I decided to mod both the neck and the body. Here’s why: Having measured the
body, I discovered the neck pocket was only about .5mm narrower than a typical Fender Strat, and the shape of the heel cut-out was also pretty- much correct.
The neck, on the other hand, had the correct width for a Strat but the shape of the heel end was somewhere between the rounded shape of a Strat and the much squarer shape of a Fender Tele. I decided to clamp the neck to a genuine Fender licenced Strat neck and used that as a template to etch the correct heel profile (Fig. 3). I then carefully filed the new neck to that shape. Then, I cut the body to the same profile, using mostly only a couple of files and plenty of ‘check as you go’. All of this is shown in detail on the Playmusic web site.
Take it to the bridge…
One thing that was very important to getting the neck alignment right was installing the Wilkinson Tele-style bridge assembly, so that I could work out exactly where the strings were supposed to be ‘pointing’ as they left the neck (Fig. 4). As the video explains, it turned out that the
pre-drilled string holes through the body were slightly inaccurate in their location. This wasn’t a big problem but it did bring back to me that old saying “measure twice and cut once”. By carefully aligning the bridge plate to the pickup and neck routs, I was then able to draw a ‘centre line’. This gave me important information about where to cut wood from the body to get a really great- fitting neck (Fig. 5). By the way, I know there’s a small amount of
treble pickup rout showing outside the bridge plate. That’s because the body is routed for humbuckers. Until I’ve tried it, I don’t know if the steely whine of a Telecaster-style pickup will suit the tone of a body with such a thick slab of maple on it. If it doesn’t, I’ll swap it for a humbucker. Meanwhile I’ve designed a scratch plate that covers the hole. Take a look at the video and you’ll not only get a feel for how I managed to cut the neck pocket but you can also see me fit the neck bolts and plate. Then I add the machine heads and fit a couple of strings, to check that the neck is in the right position.
Fig. 1 - As the callipers show, the neck was about .5mm wider than the body pocket.
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Jobs like fitting new machine heads don’t take massive engineering skills but they’re so much easier to get right once someone else has shown you how. Please keep emailing me with your questions, and check in next month to see how my build is getting along. PM
Fig. 2 - The neck at the top of the picture has a standard heel shape for a Fender Strat. My project neck didn’t conform to any Fender shape.
Fig. 3 - I used the neck with the correct heel shape as a template to draw on the project neck, then took off the surplus with a file.
EXTRA ONLINE RESOURCES Even though we’re using pre-made parts on this phase of our guitar- modifying project, there are several extra details I’d like to share with you that there just isn’t room for in the magazine. So if you’d like to see a lot more tips and tricks that can make the difference between an OK guitar build and one that knocks yer socks off, please visit the web site for the videos and PDFs I’ve put together.
www.playmusicpickup.co.uk
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