Neck Angle Question

[NoahCap]

Long time troller, first time poster, seeking help for my first build.  I know next to nothing about guitar builds so please excuse naïve questions.

Briefly, I am making a flat-topped guitar from a Warmoth body blank with a handmade lefty bolt-on neck salvaged from an old garage sale guitar.  The neck, as far as I can tell, does not to conform to any standard but I used it because that is the neck I learned on and, frankly, nothing feels quite like it.  Seasoned players think it feels a bit “off” but to me it’s perfect.

This brings me to my question; once bolted on, how do I determine whether the neck is fitting to the body at the correct angle?  Since the neck is a bit weird, I had to route out some of the pocket to get it to fit at all, and with my limited experience I am worried that I may have screwed up the neck fit.  I’ve bolted on the neck and there is nothing obviously wrong but I want to get the fit possible.  The bridge is Tune O Matic style and strings are through body.  I know Warmoth makes a neck pocket with a few degrees angle for this setup, but how can I measure such a small angle, and is it even necessary?  I found plenty of info about how to put it a shim but little about how to determine when shimming is desirable/necessary.

Thank you for reading this long post and any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[Cagey]

Install the bridge, and put a string or two on the instrument. I suspect what you'll find is the strings will be substantially high off the fretboard (unplayably so), and no amount of adjustment at the bridge will bring them down far enough.

The preferred solution is an angled neck pocket so you have a good solid joint there. But, shims will allow you to at least assemble and play it. Chances are it'll be a bit dead, though. Shimmed neck joints are kukka.

You need a protractor to measure angles, although you can probably count on about 3 degrees being right. Still need the protractor to set that up to route. You will also find a neck routing template comes in handy, such as one of these...

You'll also want a short pattern-following mortising bit, such as a Whiteside #3001.

Install the template on the proper angle (use the protractor to find it), set the router depth to 1.29 hairs and route the floor of the neck pocket. That bit is short enough that it'll ride the sides of the pocket rather than the template. The template just provides a safe work surface for the router to ride on. You'll need to make a couple/few passes before the pocket floor has all been touched.

 

[Steve_Karl]

Maybe someone should explain how to correctly and safely shim a neck without damaging the neck pocket?

I tried it once with the mahogany body (my avitar) and maple neck and used a thin piece of cardboard as the shim,
the kind of grey cardboard you commonly find on the back of a tablet of paper,
and the cardboard eventually deformed the wood in the neck pocket.

Possibly this was because of over tightening the screws?

The card board shim wasn't as wide as the whole neck pocket and there was probably about 3/16th" or more
clearance on either side between the shim and the neck pocket screws on the "towards the headstock" side.

It's not a problem now,
but I think it's worth mentioning that mahogany is soft enough to be deformed by pressure.

 

[stubhead]

Here's a bunch more:
http://www.unofficialwarmoth.com/index.php?topic=21989.0

In my reply above, I was being somewhat overblown, but, there is nagging at the nub of my brainstem, the fact that having done things the "wrong" way for a long time - shims; and having found a pile of them in around half of every other "great" boltneck I've seen, it certainly didn't bother St. Leo! Supposedly every work bench in the final assembly line at Fender had cups full of three or four different -sized shims. And while a perfect neck fit ("You can pick it up by the neck, with no screws fastened! EEEE! EEE!) is a sign of attentiveness to detail, or a sign that somebody blew the specs TOO tight earlier down the road, but it seems to me to have little or any effect on tone that I can notice, and there are those who consider the 68-69 Telecaster to be the "best" ones, because they're more versatile. Scotty Anderson, Brad Paisley & James Burton "made their bones"on these, and no one complained then.

(This part has a long procedural/thinking cap added edit!) ->

What using/experimenting  with shims will do is teach you the size of the increment that needs to be adjusted to get some nice break angle over the bridge, lift strings that are flat on the neck (or palm-slicing allen head spikes, or the opposite, way-high action)  As I said in the previous thread, you can go by how much of the turtle you decapitate (lop off his head, or his legs depending...) but it's better to KNOW your thicknesses first than to guess -

"What thickness shim does what to the action?"

If you don't have calipers to measure thicknesses, a crescent wrench or vise-grip pliers or a small vice or a C-clamp will still do the trick. Old non-digital calipers can be had for $5 or $10 on Ebay or much much less at yard sales or Salvation Army stores.

I follow the G& L dictum re: setting the neck solidly in the pocket - the string pull does it - p.4 #6, p.7 #3.
http://www.glguitars.com/faq/glmanual.pdf
My necks are pulling against the end of the pocket, not towards the sides. However this is the last step.)

In my Neanderthalic Git'r Done version, you don't NEED to know anything other than
"what thickness shim does WHAT to my action?" Protractors, feeler gauges, $99 Ste-Mac doogoobertronic Whazzits, bah humbug. What you already have in beautifully-accurate gauged-thickness hard plastic are:

:blob7: :headbang: :hello2:Guitar Picks! :hello2: :headbang: :blob7:​

0.88mm, 0.56mm, 0.1.14mm, 1.26mm.... The shim thickness is written right on your shim material!  And you can use your ersatz “calipers” - the wrench, the C-clamp etc. to do some comparative thickness gauging.  I cut shims to go outside the screws, I mean either all the way at the bottom of the pocket or all the way at the top, falling-off side of the screws. Now, all this involves taking the neck off, putting the neck on, taking the neck off... and it doesn't need to "be finished" all at once. If I can get a guitar playable, I may do the capo trick (see Fishman article) and pull the neck two or three times, but then play the damn thing, don't obsess over what's non-perfect about it. It can often take me a year to figure out exactly what string type, string gauge, and action height works best for a particular guitar.

Perfection in playability is a great ideal to work towards, but it never, ever actually gets absolutely “perfect”  - just better than last time! Think of a pendulum, just gradually slowing down shoop-shoop-shoop towards stopping in the center zone of “absolutely  perfect!” And then you try a different string gauge and you're screwed all over again! :toothy12:

Regarding Mr Karl's mahogany deforming - yes it is real, he may have overtightened or he may have been trying really narrow shims. I think a shim, whether cut directly from a few guitar picks or cut from a comparatively-measured material, should be about 3/8” wide. You may have to notch it (“Honey? Have you seem my nail scissors?”) notch it a bit to get around the screws. And if tightness is a good thing, OVER-tightness isn't any better.

I put threaded inserts on my necks, but if you've got wood screws you want to treat them kindly, don't overtighten them and make sure you never cross-thread one. I always make sure to USE THE SAME SCREWS on any given guitar, yes they're all #8 wood screws, but there are about 5 different brands and there are differences in the shape of the “blades?” or whatever that...tooth is called, the thickness of the shaft etc. I personally like the threaded inserts for several reasons, but I KNOW you can remove and re-attach necks with screws several dozens of times without a problem unless you just totally doof it somehow. And it's not going to take much because of the angles - I have never seen a neck/body problem where a 2mm shim wasn't way too much.


OVER-tightness - it's a BAD thing.....

 

[Updown]

Maybe someone should explain how to correctly and safely shim a neck without damaging the neck pocket?

http://www.fishman.com/software/tripleplay/help/tripleplay_tut10.pdf

 

[NoahCap]

Thank you for all your help everybody.  Cagey, you are correct.  I put on the neck and the strings are way too high.  The bridge I chose is a Tune-O-Matic style bridge and it is too high even in the lowest position.  I took the bottom of the bridge to a belt sander to lower the action but it still was not enough.  I wouldn't say that the action is "unplayably" high, but it is too high for my liking.

I was thinking of adding an additional piece of wood that would fit in the entire floor of the neck pocket.  Such an insert would allow me to raise the neck from the body (hence lowering the action) as much as I want and also use a protractor to sand down the top surface of the insert to the appropriate angle.  I was concerned about how to route an angle as small as a few degrees into the pocket itself with any sort of accuracy but sanding down an insert to go into the pocket is much easier.

What do you think an ideal angle for such an insert might be?  I've seen anywhere from 1-3 degrees on  various websites.  Any suggestions?

 

[Cagey]

It'll be between 1-3 degrees, but without a lot of goofing around probably the easiest way to do it would be incrementally. That is, make a 1 degree angle and see how things look. If it's not enough, add some. You'll get there. You don't need to bolt the neck up or tension the strings fully - two screws on diagonal corners, and see how things look.

Thing is, a whole slice of wood is probably going to be too much all by itself. If you don't want to route the neck pocket floor, you may as well do the shim thing.