So, if you are playing the home game - here's where we stand...
The wood was glued, traced, sawed, routed, drilled, routed again, and sanded. If I were this piece of wood - I'd ask for my money back.
At this point in my build I took a two-week detour. I put the guitar together. It made little sense at first (and I have no pictures to document it) but I assembled the guitar. I put the neck on the body, I wired up the electronics, and I plugged that sucker in! It was fun and I have no regrets but it did put me 'off-schedule' by a couple of weeks while I was enjoying my new Tele. But seriously, I wanted to make sure that everything fit - that the body and neck pocket were lined up correctly and that the action and intonation could be properly set-up. My thought-process was that if I waited until after I stained and lacquered the body I might miss an opportunity to fine-tune the shape and then have to sand or reshape a body that has been 'finished.' I was guessing that once I got to the lacquering/finishing stage I wouldn’t want to sand the body too much. Ha! Little did I know...
As a side note - the guitar set up well and sounded pretty raunchy (that's a good thing) but putting the neck on the body did highlight an area that needed to be looked at - the neck pocket.
The neck itself was straight but there were a couple of 'dead-spots' on the neck right where the neck joined the body. When the notes were played (or fretted) they would not ring out clearly. This was due to the strings buzzing on another fret somewhere. The problem wasn't based on string height or the straightness of the neck but rather the angle of the entire neck in the neck pocket. I read somewhere (maybe Steward McDonald) that the neck may need to be shimmed so that it is angled a bit more in the pocket itself. In effect the neck as a whole is either pointing up or down too much in the pocket and I need to adjust it - hence the shims. This is where the fine-tuning comes in. I've read of people putting thin slices of wood, metal even matchbook covers on one side of the neck pocket (sandwiched in between the neck and the body) to angle the neck just a little to remove the dead spots. Matchbook covers! Crazy Talk!
Another piece of information I gleaned from assembling the guitar prior to staining and finishing it was that I had placed the bridge too close to the neck. When deciding where to place the bridge on the body of your guitar you have to know the "scale length" you are using. The scale length is the distance from the nut on the neck to the place on the guitar where the string makes contact with the bridge (usually the saddles). Fender Strats and Teles are approximately 25 1/5 scale. Gibson guitars are a little over 24 inch scale and PRS guitars are somewhere in between (more proof that Mr. Smith was trying to find the market in the middle of these two products). I measured the distance from the nut to the 12th fret (on the neck) and then placed the bridge that same distance from the 12th fret to the body. It's supposed to measure something close to 25 1/2 inches from the nut to the bridge. So I did this but when I placed the bridge - I placed it so that the holes that hold the bridge to the body were 25 and 1/2 inches from the nut. I should have been measuring to the saddles - not the holes. It's not the end of the world but it meant that I would have to alter the springs that control the saddle positioning on the bridge. I clipped the springs in half, which should allow me to position the saddles directly above the holes that hold the bridge to the body - thereby giving me a 25 1/2 inch scale. For the blissfully ignorant this fine tuning of string length and saddle positioning allows me to ensure that any note played on the neck in tune. If the intonation of the string is off less than or more than 25 1/2 inches - notes will be sharp or flat.
So, I was able to identify a couple of things that I should fix prior to finishing the body. I thought to myself, "I made some goofs but nothing major. So far, so good!"
...but the doozey was still yet to come.
2 comments:
Jerry, thanks for this post. I'm not nearly as daring (or talented!) as you, but using spare parts to build a tele. I'm having the exact same problems with neck shim/dead spots. Anyway, great blog and much appreciated!
I got a cheep used vintage Japanese tesco an sanded off all the veneer an tried to put on new veneer with hide glue, with my weights an c clamps really made a mess of things,an now I found a new tele-body from Guitar fetish an I'm going to try again. reason I read your article is the bridge distance .thank's, really good refresher as I put down this prodject for over a year.
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