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Building a hot-mod guitar – pt 2 Simon Croft continues to assemble his custom guitar, adding the tuners and stringing the instrument up for the first time…


M


y new guitar is starting to look and feel much more like a real instrument than it did a month ago. This is still a ‘dry build’ –


meaning I’ll take it all apart once everything is working, spray the body, then put it all back together again – but I can actually play it now. What I can’t do is plug it in yet, but let’s go one step at a time. Last month, I left off just as I was about to drill the holes in the neck. Fortunately, the factory- drilled holes in the body were just the right diameter to hold the drill bit I needed to make the four holes in the neck about 1/8 inch (See fig. 1). This is unusual: normally the holes in the body are pre-drilled so that the neck bolts are a snug fit, but the thread doesn’t bite into wood


until the bolts reach the neck. Note: If that’s the case in your build, you can


pad out the drill bit by wrapping masking tape round it (See fig. 2). The idea is to get the drill padded out until it can only sit straight as it passes through the factory-drilled holes. This is something I explain in some detail in the Adjusting Neck Alignment PDF, which you can download from the Playmusic web site. Having clamped the neck and body together, I drilled the holes through the neck. Then I re-drilled the body to make the existing holes larger in diameter. You want the bolts to pass through the body, rather than thread into it. Otherwise, the bolts will tend to get too firm a grip on the body – as you screw them in – and actually push the neck away slightly as they exit the neck pocket. This isn’t what you want to happen: the bolts are supposed to clamp the neck to the body. Take a look at the video at -


www.playmusicpickup.co.uk, and you’ll see, hey, I’ve cut such a tight neck pocket that I can pick up the neck and the body stays attached. This is even without any neck bolts/screws. As you might imagine, I felt pretty good about the build at that point.


Fig. 1 - Drilling the neck. Because the drill is a tight fit for the factory-drilled holes in the body, we can be certain the holes in the neck will be straight.


Strings that go ‘braaaang’ in the night…


Fig. 2 - Masking tape. If the drill isn’t a snug fit through the body holes, you can pad it out with masking tape. Actually, in this shot I’m winding on an end stop, so that the drill doesn’t go too deep. The 2-inch tape is better for padding out.


38 3pickup


As it happens, I ended up taking the neck off again, after I’d strung the guitar up. I’m telling you this because it’s important to understand that a custom build isn’t like factory assembly. There’s an element of ‘test as you go along’. You’ll often need to take things apart – cut some wood, metal or plastic – then put everything back together again until you get it right. Now here’s where I can save you some money. If you trash a set of strings every time you take the neck off, things start to get expensive. Luckily, there is a way to remove a ‘bolt on’ neck without saying goodbye to a brand new set of guitar strings. You can see this in action on the Playmusic web site, where I take the neck off a Strat, remove the electrics, and put the neck back without losing a single string. Although it’s easiest to understand from the online video, it’s a simple enough trick, so I’ll repeat the basic steps here. First, slacken off the strings to the point


they still sit pretty straight along the neck but there’s no real tension in them any more. Second, wrap two strips of masking tape


round the neck – one close to the nut and the other closer to the heel. (Don’t try this trick with other tapes, such as gaffer, because you’ll get in a hell of a mess when you try to get it off again.) Step three is to flip the guitar over and undo the bolts. If you’re careful, you should then be able to remove the neck and put it to one side (See fig. 3).


Getting our heads together But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself here, because we should talk about fitting the tuners (often referred to as machineheads). The Wilkinson tuners I fitted are similar to the types fitted to modern Fenders, where two little lugs go into the wood at the back of the headstock, so that when the nut on the front is done up, the tuner can’t twist out of position (See fig. 4). It’s a great system and it looks very neat because there are no screws at the back. The question is, how do you know where to drill the holes? It’s an important question because if the tuners are even slightly out of line, it will look really amateurish. I thought about making up a template with mathematically calculated holes for me to drill through but I came up with a simpler solution. I put the machineheads on one at a time and did up the retaining nuts finger tight. Then I lined up the casings against the side of a ruler


Fig. 3 -More masking tape! This time, it’s keep the strings in check, so that I can take the neck off and one without trashing the set. In this shot, I’ve taken off the bridge plate and I’m re-cutting the pickup rout.


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