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What the hell am I going to do with this thing?

mayfly

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I broke my own rule: never buy anything at a guitar show.
I bought this body on a whim for a great deal at the end of the Ottawa guitar show:

IMG_20250526_085626_652LoRes.jpg

I did verify that the neck pocket fits a telecaster heel. What I DID NOT verify was scale length! ... and neck construction ... and string height. Turns out that this body is designed for the 24'th fret to be at the outside edge of the neck pocket, and the neck extends under the neck pickup sans fingerboard, and the fingerboard is over 1/2" above the body at that point.

So now what?

I've yet to do some measurements (busy getting ready for another guitar show next weekend) but I'm wondering if I should buy a W Baritone neck sans frets/slots/markers (will they do that?) and route away the fingerboard where it meets the body... assuming the scale length works for that situation... and assuming I can actually properly cut slots and add frets and put in the markers, and assuming the string height works ... and... and.......

Crap. What the hell have I gotten myself into here?
 
I'm so jealous I might throw up. Looking forward to seeing what comes of this. Are you going with conventional Rickenbacker electronics, but with a unique neck?
 
Heck, the electronics will be the easy part with this thing! I need to figure out the neck first...
 
I'm just thinking, and of course I'm probably way off base, but if you use a fretless board, would scale length matter, theoretically?

I mean short scale, long scale, baritone, bass?
 
A dealer of mine identified it as the body of a Jaguar Rick copy (made in Korea). He has one - I'm going to get some measurements when I see him next week.
 
I'm not sure what a "great deal" could possibly be on that piece of ... ummm ... firewood? :confused:

"One man's trash", I guess.

I hope you didn't pay more than 10-20 bucks for it! 😁
 
Here's an update! I searched around and I found that Precision Guitar makes a long-tenon guitar neck in a gibson scale length (24.75" - same as the rick). I comes with a quite deep neck joint and as a bonus they offer it with a paddle headstock. So I bought one.

Aaaand it arrived today! So as the joke goes there's good news and bad news:
Overall it looks pretty good:
IMG_20250731_082941_223LoRes.jpg

The neck is a bit too big for the body, but nothing a router would not fix:

IMG_20250731_082946_820LoRes.jpg

and the fingerboard would sit nice and high off the body to accommodate those rick pickups. In fact I might have to shave it down. Will definitely have to shave it down on the top side so that the wood is flush with the top of the body.

IMG_20250731_083023_571LoRes.jpg

But there's a small problem: if I just put it in the body as shown, the scale length would be around 25.5"

IMG_20250731_083159_219LoRes.jpg

Hmmm - some modification is required. But surely it will be no problem to cut a rick headstock shape on the paddle - right?
IMG_20250731_083224_379LoRes.jpg

Hmmm again. Much work to be done here.
 
Excited to see where this goes. With that much heel, if the scale's too long you could probably remove a bit of that and get closer.
 
The neck pocket was so close to the required size that I decided to just open it up a bit with a razor file:

IMG_20250803_172249_999LoRes.jpg

Seems to fit:

IMG_20250803_172311_993LoRes.jpg

it sure sits proud of the body though!!

IMG_20250803_172502_113LoRes.jpg

There is that scale length issue to be addressed:

IMG_20250803_172811_451LoRes.jpg

Can only move the neck so far back though: as the bass side is pretty close to the body:

IMG_20250803_172325_522LoRes.jpg
 
Can't you just make the neck pocket longer?
Sure! But then there would be a little notch where the body meets the neck on the bass side. I might be able to get 1/8" that way, or maybe more since I plan to cut the heel down on the bottom a bit.

This brings us to the second problem: The heel of the neck is not parallel to the fretboard; it's angled down at a typical gibson neck angle. Ricks have their necks flat WRT the body ... should I do the same here or angle it? Hmmmm....
 
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