Neck pocket question

[djmarcelca]

http://www.daddario.com/DAstringtens...5-d327477403f3


I was reading on D'Addario website that string tension on a full set of 0.10's is around the 103.6 inch pound area. Which is remarkably lower then I believed.

This makes me wonder about a lot of the smaller neck joints I see out there.
SG, PRS in particular have only 1/2 inch thick pockets that the neck is glued into

makes me also wonder if the 3/4 inch thick joint on fender style guitars are overkill?
I notice ibanez and various clones are small thin joints but do not seem to have breakout problems.

builders care to explain?

 

[bagman67]

A lot of what you see as standard on electric guitars is standard due to pure inertia.


Leo tooled his factory to maximize throughput with minimally skilled workers.  There's no point in retooling the factory if what you're doing is still selling, and still works.  While much of what Leo did was perhaps not the best solution, it was generally workable, and in the absence of a competitively priced superior alternative, folks made do - and everyone got used to it that way - so much so, in fact, that workable bolt-on neck joints that afford much better access to higher frets are a tough sell.  Would be buyers have been so conditioned to expect a big ol' chunk o' lumber in the way that they are loath to experiment, even if it means they'd be able to play more efficiently.


At the same time, however, note that the early SG's were notorious for breakage at the heel - unlike modern Gibby's, which can be counted on to break at the neck-to-headstock transition.


And note further that PRS and Gibson (and other set-neck builders) also have a tenon running deep into the body, which provides a larger and therefore more secure gluing surface.  Which also makes it inexplicable that Gibson has such huge heels on run-of-the-mill Les Pauls - until you figure in the inertia phenomenon discussed above.

 

[Cagey]

You also have to keep in mind that correlation is not causation.  For instance, Gibson uses a somewhat weak neck joint in some models of their guitars, just as others do. But, you hear about Gibson neck joint failure much more often. Is it a crummy joint? Not necessarily. They make a helluva lot more guitars than some manufacturers do. As a result, their failure rates are gong to sound higher in pure numbers, but as a percentage of output, it's relatively small. 

In other words, Gibson necks may break 2,000 times a year, while Ibanez necks only break 200 times a year. But, Gibson may make 20,000 guitars while Ibanez only makes 2,000. Considering that, they both fail with the same ratio: 1:1000. Yes, there are a lot more Gibson failures, but only because there are a lot more Gibson guitars.

 

[drewfx]

And in addition to the string tension, some people like Pete Townshend and Adrian Belew have been known to bend the neck back and forth to get vibrato.

 

[bagman67]

I was doing that just yesterday, in fact.  You gotta work at it to get neck-flex vibrato out of a boatneck, it turns out.

 

[djmarcelca]

I've seen some of the PRS bolt ons have the tenon that runs under the front humbucker, I've always assumed it was the same neck as the glued in just bolted instead.

I've often wondered, with a bolt on neck, how a triangular shaped pocket would feel like.
Large wide tenon on the heel, and 3 bolt triangle, larger bolt at the apex around the 17th fret and 2 smaller at the heel.

Would solve both thickness (3/4 inch is maintained) and allows comfortable access to the upper register.

 

[Cagey]

And in addition to the string tension, some people like Pete Townshend and Adrian Belew have been known to bend the neck back and forth to get vibrato.

A buddy of mine used to have an old Gibson Firebird he liked to use that technique on. Then one time while playing the intro to Heart's "Barracuda", he snapped the neck off the thing. Surprised the hell out of everybody who'd never played a Firebird. The rest of us just said

I shouldn't make fun, though. I'm guilty of teaching the technique to him because I used to do it with my old '61 Melody Maker, which also had a neck that would bend in a light breeze.

We were die-hard Gibson fans back then, and wouldn't own a Fender to save our lives. Mainly because they had poorly designed vibrato bridges that made them impossible to tune, but also because they were noisier than the Wayne County jail on a Saturday night.

 

[stubhead]

There's a lot of people working around that joint these days, these are D'Pergo's but it's not patentable and all sorts of "luthiers" are taking down wood there:





Malinoski:



From what I know about wood, it would seem just about impossible to SNAP OFF a neck pocket with more than an inch or so of wood there - right across the strongest part of the grain? On my last, I just did a quickie slice about 3/4" deep on the most protuberant corner:



But I'm eying my new baby Strat, thinking you could draw a line knocking down THREE of the four screws... I think I like it better than the slanty/slopy approach.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

That's an interesting new scale length and neck profile you've got going on there too. How is it to play?

 

[stubhead]

no matter how much elmers used i could not to get the strings tit stay, i just scoop to catbox it now :sad1: