How To Angle A Neck-thru Neck

[verhoevenc]

I'm building a bass that required quite the neck angle to accommodate the bridge that my friend wanted used. HOWEVER, he also wanted this build to be a neck-thru, so I came up with the following system for doing the neck angle.

Firstly, take your top wing and glue it to the neck thru blank at the desired angle that you want and let it dry. It can be kinda hard with how the glue makes things slide around and what not, but bear with it and get it clamped in time! It can obviously be done!

But now you're going, "When I glue the other side on... how am I to assure that it will be glued on at exactly the same angle?!?!!?"

That's where this comes in. Take a MDF board about the width of your instrument. Then, take two more equally thick pieces of MDF and glued them to either side leaving a space the width of your neck blank plus about 1/2" extra. You should end up with like two plateaus and a valley in the middle. Then take the wing and neck that's already glued and clamp the wing down to one of the plateaus with the neck hanging in the valley (this is needed because of the angle, there's a part of the blank that will hang below the plane of the wings).

Then, take the other wing and put the needed glue, and then clamp it flat onto the plateau as well, up close to the neck blank. These clampings flat to the two plateaus of equal height is what assures the two wings are on the same angle and plane!!!! Now that they are perfectly on the same plane/angle you can bust out the bar clamps and apply the lateral pressures that will hold it snug against the neck blank.

This following picture shows you a side view so that you can see how there's more neck blank sticking up at the end, and then angling down to being even with the wings near the neck, thus establishing the neck angle.

Last but not least, once everything has finished glueing, take it out and let the glue cure. Then, using once again two equally thick slabs of MDF, double-stick-tape them to the back of the body on either side of the neck blank. Then take out your router and have the base rest on these two pieces and set the depth to exactly the thickness of the two MDF pieces. Then move it around until you've planed off the parts of the neck blank that were sticking out above the wings' plane. Repeat this for the neck blank section sticking up on the front as well, and voila! You're done, perfectly flat, perfectly angled neck!

Chris

PS: I don't know why, but the glare in the camera makes it look like the solar-flare at the 12th fret doesn't have a complete arm... I assure you it does

Edited January 25, 2007 by verhoevenc

[Setch]

Nice simple solution Chris. I use the MDF shims and router trick all the time to trim areas of the guitar, and to thickness small pieces for headplates, pickup rings etc.

[fryovanni]

Clever method Cris. I have always set my neck angle in the neck block before I attached the wings, but if you choose to attach the wings before. This seem like a nifty way to work it out.

Peace,Rich

[Desopolis]

one thing im curious about, what if you had a figured top that would cover the neck lams?

should you just carve the angle out of the blank, or do something like what you did?

[Inisheer]

Looks nice, I'd like to make a neck through bass someday, but it looks difficult. If there is that bit sticking out on the top, does that mean that there is not enough on the bottom? Or is the neck thick enough to stick out on both sides?

[verhoevenc]

The body was 1.5" thick, the neck blank 1.75" thick. So I had 1/4" sticking out at the rear of the body on the top, which because of the angle lessened out to nothing up by the neck, and thus, conversely, there was a 1/4" sticking out the back up near the neck, but nothing sticking out the back near the rear of the body. Get it?

And if you did a top that covered the lams, you COULD do it this way by attaching the neck to the wings, planing flat like I did here, and then just having left enough space to glue on the top after, and then laminate trim to fit the shape.

Chris