Hi,
I'm currently half way through building a partscaster with my girlfriend's dad, with parts mostly bought from stewmac, and I've hit a problem with the neck.

Stewmac sell vintage 63' strat bodies and fender replacement necks - both of which we've bought as we were told that they'd fit together. They don’t! well they don’t actually work together as a guitar but they do fit.

The neck heel seems to be about 3mm too tall and I think it’s because modern necks are a little taller than vintage counter parts, unfortunately I can’t find any information to support my claim.

What I have done is measure my 91 standard strat and found some discrepancies -

The replacement neck and the 91 standard neck are almost exactly the same (barring that across the playing surface the replacement neck is about 1mm thinner, the heel is exactly the same) : 25.5mm or 1 inch

The body pocket, however, differs between the two bodies the stewmac body is 15.88mm deep (5/8's which is vintage spec) but the 91 strat is 18.5mm deep - and that 2.3mm would make all the difference back at the bridge (between unplayable because the string is actually on the fretboard and having some kind of action).


SO, after this rather long winded explanation (sorry), does anyone know the depth/height of the neck heel of a vintage strat (63 ish)?

Hi a_whichello: that is interesting and rather surprising.

I have taken careful measurements from many Strats from all parts of the catalog and across decades. While most of the specs change a bit between models and across time and geography, certain key dimensions are always the same, in my experience. One of those is the depth of the neck pocket, which is always 16mm - or, as you say, more accurately 5/8", the imperial measurement Fenders were designed to. This excludes lacquer thickness, which can make more of a difference than we might imagine.

Another reliable dimension is the thickness of the neck at the heel, front to back. That is always close on 26mm, give or take a tiny bit depending on how heavy the hand of the machinist radiusing the fingerboard was that day.

Provided those two dimensions are always the same then Strat and Tele necks should always set up without need for shimming, and I've found that to be the case on all the Strats I've handled built at least since the early '80s, if not before. Also, I haven't observed any difference between "vintage" and "modern" as regards these numbers, and they stay the same from Squiers up to Am Deluxes and regardless of country of manufacture.

So, a couple of points. No doubt your '91 Strat body has its finish on, and I'm guessing that is likely to be a polyurethane lacquer. If that happens to be a bit on the thick side then that by itself may account for much of the discrepancy between it and the Stew-Mac body, the pocket of which from your description seems to be routed to the correct depth.

Have you actually tried setting your partsocaster up? If not, give it a go. Probably you will find there is no problem, especially once it has its finish on. But if there is an issue and you feel the neck is sitting a touch too high in relation to the bridge, well then you can either route the pocket a mil or so deeper using a half inch long 3/8" router cutter with a copy routing bearing collar on the shaft (it has to be that rather small sized cutter to fit right into the corners of the pocket, where the radius is too tight for a normal 1/2" cutter). Or you can simply reverse-shim the neck to bring the nut forward slightly in relation to the heel and so create the correct line of travel for the strings across the fingerboard and on to the saddles.

I've a feeling none of that will turn out to be necessary, but those are the potential fixes to this problem.

Any help?

Cheers - C

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a_whichello Here is a little something I put together. It has the same dimensions as yours.

We've essentially fixed the problem by shaving down the heel a couple of mm and it plays great now, except for the very low quality nut shipped with the fender replacement neck.

But I can't see how a neck that size can fit in a pocket of that size and not have a rather large gap (2mm-3mm, in my case about 2.5mm as it turns out) between the bottom of the 22nd fret and the scratch plate