Need 3/16" Maple Dowell

[rgraf]

Anyone know where I can get a 3/16" hard maple dowell to fill and relocate the mounting holes in a neck?

I'm fitting a Squier Strat neck I had lying around to fit my FujiGen Tele. To get it to intonate, I had to flatten the heel of it because the original neck evidently wasn't standard and there wasn't enough adjustment in my saddles to compensate. The benefit is that now the neck has a Tele type flat heel so the pickguard fits nicely. The drawback is that the screw holes are off from the holes in the body.

I tried Stewmac, Allparts, ebay and did a general search online of various woodworking suppliers. No joy, there. Any other suggestions? Thanks.

You could try getting a plug cutter. The plug cutter will allow you to create a plug that, unlike a piece of dowel, would have the proper grain orientation, which should hold a screw better if the screw were to overlap the filled hole.

 

[line6man]

You do not want to use dowels for filling neck holes. You need wood plugs, with the grain running perpendicular to the hole. With a regular dowel, you are drilling into end grain, and end grain does not hold screws very well.

 

[rgand]

That's good to know. Of course, it's all academic now because that neck turned out to be slightly twisted and isn't usable. It was good practice plugging holes, though.  :icon_biggrin:

 

[rgraf]

Thanks for the suggestion. I guess I could do that. The only thing that makes me hesitant about doing it that way is that the holes are not going back in quite the same place and may overlap the filled holes a little bit. Is poplar hard enough so that the screws don't migrate over into softer wood when screwed in? Having never filled a neck hole before, perhaps I'm a little over cautious.

I doubt that anyone sells poplar dowels. Most of the dowels I haave seen are birch or maple. Walnut, oak and mahogany are the other woods I've seen, but only sold as dowel rods, pins.