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Post subject: Route the neck or what?
Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2010 9:34 pm
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Joined: Thu Dec 06, 2007 10:46 am
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Location: Hiawatha, KS
I am making a Squier partscaster that is similar to a JM Black 1 signature and I got my strat body today. I put my bullet neck on it and it fit pretty good. I have one concern though. The neck stands off of the body 5/16" vs. my CV60 which is 1/4". Do I need to worry about it or is it nothing. I don't have a tremolo or tuners yet to put on it to see how it's gonna be with it strung up. It just looks sorta weird. I put a pickguard on it and it looked better. If that's out of wack, would it be best remove some material from the neck pocket or sand the heel of the neck down that 1/16"?

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Post subject: I think I can help with this Q
Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2010 10:15 pm
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Just got thru replacing an old vintage P bass neck with a broken truss rod, with a newer Squire Affinity P bass neck in an Explorer style bass body made of Koa wood. So, I ran into some of the same issues, only a bit different.

In my case the neck pocket was not long enough to accomodate the new Squire neck, and the neck pocket was not wide enough by about 1/8".

So, I bought a variable speed rotary Dremel tool at Sears with accessories for $69 and "routed" it out by hand. A little at a time very carefully so as not to ruin the body. It was tricky. One false move and the project is screwed up forever.

Got the neck to fit, but the pocket was not flat, as this is really hard to do by hand, and this I only discovered when I realized that the neck did not sit flat and I could not keep the strings in tune due to this issue. Took it all back apart, and did my best to sand the FLOOR of the pocket flat. Could not quite get it flat, so I used peel and stick copper shielding foil to overlay the floor and get it to a flat surface (now that sounds odd but it worked well, and I have plenty of it on hand anyway).

The moral of this story is that you can either route the pocket or sand the heel. Either will do the job. But routing out the pocket works much better with a real router and a template, so that you don't damage the body. Take out too much material and your project is toast.

Sanding the heel of the neck (carefully, a little at a time with a belt sander at first, then by hand with assorted grits, starting with something heavy, is probably the best bet.

Finally, be aware that the neck plate screws are #8 - 1 3/4" (unless you opt for #10 2" screws like I did to get a really secure fit and connection.) So if you sand off 1/8", you should be OK., but double check the screw length before you run it all the way down.

Hope that helps... if I had it to do over, I would have borrowed a friends router, by the way.


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