Spot on 5/8".

I really hadn't thought about that. Good stuff!

Andy

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Pending Greatness

Yep, as Niki says: I measured the neck pocket depth indirectly (because it was late at night and I couldn't be bothered to take the neck off!), by measuring from the back of the heel to the base of the neck. Since the body thickness should be pretty much standard (bit of an assumption I grant you), a thciker heel should equate to a shallower neck pocket!

I tried to do this as accurately as possible resting a straight edge along the neck plate and using a rular to measure meausre the gap between the back of the neck (where it joins the body), and the back of the heel by reading-off the scale of the rular were it crosses the straight edge.

When I work out how to upload a phot onto this site I show you what I mean- a picture paints a thousannd words, particularly if you're as inarticulate as me! But I hope you get what I mean from the discription above.

I will double check in strong daylight just to make sure, and post again; but the neck pocketsof both my 1985 '72 reissue MIJ and my recently-bought CP60s were 1/16" shallower than my Am Std, I concluded this by virtue of the heel of the CP60s being 1/16" THICKER than the others.

Further more, someone on this thread made the very good point that because the fretboard camber on the CP60s is 12", not the 9.5" of my others, the neck would APPEAR higher in its pocket because the neck woul in effect be thicker at its sides than one with a greater camber- TRUE.

However, the thickness of both the fretboards of my CP60s and that of my Am Std are the same at the center of the board. I established this by measuring from where the rosewood/maple join, to the top of the board between the middle two strings at the heel of the neck. That being the case. the same thickness of maple should be visible on both guitars from the top of the scratch-plate to the base of the rosewood at the heel of the neck, assuming the necks are not actually different thicknesses overall (ie from the back of the neck, at its base, to the top of the fretboard at its HIGHEST point).

Now,I can see much more maple between the top of the scratch-plate and the BASE of the rosewood (i.e. the point where the maple is glued to the rosewood), at the heel of the neck, on the CP60s than on the Am Std, therefore it MUST be sitting higher in it's pocket than the Am Sts!! UNLESS the overall thickness of the neck (to the TOP of the camber) is greater on the CP60, In truth I have not checked that yet, but I think it unlikely as neck dimentions differ greatly on different strats, yet they are all standard at the heel!

Out of interest, it would be interesting to see what the situation looks like on American guitars with thck necks: the '62 reissue hot rod for example!?

AdrianDavid

Because of the way neckpockets are cut, they need to be measured from the floor of the neck pocket to the face of the guitar. The router/milling machine/cnc cuts down from above taking it's depth measurement from the face of the guitar.

There's nothing at all wrong with your writing, what you described was crystal clear.

Now onto radi'i. The difference between a 7.25" and 20" radius curves across the 2 and a bit inch width of a neck are minimal at best. You may see a mill or mill and a half difference between those two radi'i across that couple of inches at best. Remember you're talking of a 40" diameter circle with 20" radius, 32"D with 16"R and so forth. Even the 7.25"R circle is a pretty big thing with a very soft curve to it.

I like you am feeling very lazy lately. If I can get off the sofa I'll dig my radius gauges out and draw the two curves ontop of each other in different colours. You'll struggle to see paper between the apex of the two curves across that 56mm width.

Apathy rules the day

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No no and no

Point taken Niki, but surely, provided all bodies are the same thickness, it's equally valid comparing the measured thickness of the heel of the body, and infering pocket-depth from that?

At the end of the day though, providing body thickness and neck dimension at the heel, where it inserts in to pocket are constant; any observed difference in the amount of maple between the top of the scratchplate and the plane of the rosewood/maple junction of the neck would indicate a difference in neck pocket depth between different guitars!

That's looking along the plane of the top of the guitar body, at the heel end of the neck just forward of the neck PU.

Half of my rather dull monologue above, was attempting to prove that fretboard camber didn't affect the perception of pocket-depth anyway! What you have said about the visible difference in camber actually reinforces that. (provovided total maximum fretboard thickness isthe same on boards of guitars of different radius, which it appears to be)

Ultinately we are comparing the measurement between the BASE of the fingerboard and the top of the scratchplate!

I've just double checked and it confirms what I said last night. However I agree, for this to indicate a differnce in pocket depth, several other things must be constant: body thickness, neck thickness at the heel, and fingerboard thickness. Now I just assuming they are I don't really want to take he neck off my Am Std to measure the pocket depth! I'm quite happy to with the CP60, 'cos it's the only way to adjust the truss-rod, which I've done already since the guitar had a relief in excess of .030" when I got it!!!

Ha - now I understand. That's fair enough. Thank you.

Very fascinated by this - for my own strange geeky reasons. I've never come across a Fender that strays from the 17mm (or probably more accurately 5/8") depth measurement - right down to the cheapest Chinese Squier. But that doesn't mean much: it's not like I've met more than a tiny, tiny proportion of all the Strats out there.

So I'm most interested to hear if the pocket depth is a variable figure after all.

I wonder if shops will object to me trying out guitars - and then pulling their necks off and measuring their pockets? Is that taking the demo'ing procedure a touch too far...?

Cheers - C

Me too!!! Lot of great info here, really appreciated. I'm still unsure about the full extent of the differences talked about here. So, is there something that makes the CP60s neck look taller in the pocket, or is it just some kind of illusion?

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---> "The amp should be SWITCHED OFF AND UNPLUGGED before you do this!" <---

Por favor, disculpe mi español, no se llega a la práctica con mucha frecuencia.

Andy,
Love your collection! A fellow Godin fan!
Congrats on the new addition to the herd

Got to love those Godins!

I bet your LGXT- SA is a real beast! Had a go on one of those a few years back. Awesome guitar!

Thanks to all who posted "Congrats!". The Classic Player 60's Strats get the Big Hairy Seal of Approval! Go out and buy one, you'll not regret it!

Andy

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Pending Greatness

Howdy!

You know I said I'd carry out a few modifications once I'd killed the strings....



It would appear that I've certainly killed 'A' string.

Tomorrow we take it apart and see what the score is. I'm thinking the Hot Noiseless would be very happy in there.... I'll keep you posted.

Andy

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Pending Greatness

looks great

like the godins next to it too

Very nice

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2008 MIA Standard Strat 3-tone Sunburst
2007 Taylor 310 Acoustic
Fender Blues Junior NOS Amp
Digitech Bad Monkey OD pedal

andy,

cant wait to see what youll be doing with this guitar.
got paper, check, pencil check, computer battery charged up, check.

ready to take down serious notes.

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"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."

oogway, kungfu panda 2008

Howdy and Thanks all!

Right then, let Big Hairy Surgery commence!

I've removed the neck so I can measure that up for those interested but I'll be dealing with the wiring first. When removing screws or hardware I recommend having a little dish to keep all the bits together.



What I was planning to do was swap out the Custom 69's for my set of Hot Noiseless...



... but straight away I've spotted a problem....



The Hot Noiseless don't fit!



The pickup cavity on my CP60's is just under 3 1/4" or 19mm deep...



And a Hot Noiseless pup is 1" or 25mm deep... Which doesn't leave enough room to adjust the pickup height. Something I'm always messing with so I've decided to leave the 69's in. I'm secretly quite happy about this as they've really grown on me! The HN will get dropped in something else later I expect.

So now the only thing I fancy doing to the wiring is adding a tone control to the Bridge pup. I quite fancy sharing the Middle pup tone pot for this.



The above is the simplest way to achieve this. As you can see all I've done is solder a small jumper between the two relevant terminals on the 5 way switch. The terminal on the left goes to the lower tone pot and by adding the jumper to the only spare terminal on the switch, we have the lower tone control on the Bridge pup as well. Marvellous!

We're done with the wiring so the pickguard goes back on and we can move on to the neck. The fretboard has acclimatised to my house now and the fret ends are no longer an issue so I'm just going to very slightly roll the fretboard edges. I'm going to use the "Martian Method" and very gently roll the shaft of a screw driver over the edge of the fret board to take out the hard edge.



In the pic above you can see the difference between the 10th fret which has been rolled and the 9th which hasn't. I found that to make the board comfortable I didn't need to roll very much at all, I literary just rounded the hard edge. Job done!

Martian, if your reading this, Thanks mate! That's a top tip and it worked a treat.

While I've got the neck off I might as well get my callipers out as size up the rather tasty CP60's neck.

At the heel its 13/16th" or 21mm



At the 12th fret it's about 3 1/4" or 19mm



And at the 1st fret it's 17mm



I hope that helps some of the neck thickness queries we had earlier in this thread.

I've put everything back together and put on a fresh set of D'Addario 10's and removed the back plate to set the trem to Beck wammy spec's. Now my top tip here is to sort the trem out as quick as possible, as with the back plate off its totally possible for Eric Johnson to crawl in there and steal all of your tone!

To help keep my tone from escaping I'm upgrading the stock single ply white back plate for a nice 3 ply mint green one that will match the pickguard.



And that's all I'll be doing to this Strat. Don't get me wrong it was a pleasure to play before but now.... Awww. Its just lovely!





Good stuff. Enjoy!

Andy

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Pending Greatness

andy, looks very nice.
right now my 2 faves are my cp 60s and recently acquired hr 57.
i had copper shielded mine, due to it having some static discharge. to my ears made it a little brighter. actually quieted the hum and hardly ever is plagued with static.
i blame the brightness to power of suggestion, i read somewhere, maybe misread that shielding causes it to have more capitance.. .
im gonna move the tone control from the middle pickup lug to the bridge, having the mid wide open, or just the way you did it. im still thinking about it.
i like either position 2 or 4 with high drive, with one pickup tone rolled off get some creamy tones.

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"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."

oogway, kungfu panda 2008

Hi Andy: thanks so much for that measuring.

Lummy, that's a skinny neck! That is thinner than any of my Fenders - for example, my 2005 MIA Strat is 20.9 mm at the first fret and 25.33 mm at the 12th (excluding the frets, obviously). I have an old Squier neck knocking around that is a touch slimmer than that: all my other Fenders are fatter.

The only necks I generally come across as thin as your CP60 are to be found on Ibanez shredder type guitars. How interesting.

I wonder how your measurements compare with the way necks were carved back in the days of genuine '60s guitars? If only someone had a 1964 Strat (say) that they could measure for us. ...Hey, Orvilleowner?

At least as far as ubergeeks are concerned your measurements have turned out surprisingly more fascinating than expected. Thank you!

Happy Christmas to you and Ms BigHair - C

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