Tubbles Posted February 11, 2018 Report Share Posted February 11, 2018 Hi - first time posting! I'm putting together a hardtail strat-type body, 25.5" scale length with 24 frets, and have run into a problem (born of lack of experience) on the height of my neck. This will be CNC'd so it will come out looking (hopefully) pretty exact. I am trying to figure out where I should place the neck in order to achieve the 'correct' string action along the board. I have chosen the bridge and the nut, so those are set dimensions, and will be using jumbo frets. To add to all this confusion I have foolishly decided to use a compound radius neck (12" at nut to 16" at the 24th). I got pretty stuck as my brain just can't get around the problem. I see that I have three levers - depth of the neck pocket, depth of the slot for the nut, height of the bridge, but my attempts to manipulate them to have increasing clearance have failed. My question is more of a "please help me figure out what I'm doing wrong", which I hope isn't a problem. This is potentially all less of an issue than I have decided it is, but it's at least an interesting question! I have attached a pdf of my working file, which comes from illustrator. Not sure I can attach anything bigger like a dxf! For reference: Tusq 5042 Hipshot bridge Guitar neck pocket diagram v1.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Norris Posted February 12, 2018 Report Share Posted February 12, 2018 Imagine a long rule resting on your frets, going all the way down the centre-line to the bridge. This needs to be within the adjustment range of your bridge and saddles - for any guitar. A strat normally has a zero neck angle. Therefore the height of the end of the fretboard (including fret height) needs to be about the height of your bridge - and work out how deep your pocket needs to be from there i.e. maximum depth of neck incl. frets, minus the bridge/saddle height. If in doubt cut shallow and you can always deepen it later - which is easier than shimming the neck up Don't get too hung up about the compound radius, and you can pretty much ignore the action height for your calculations. Also don't fret (ha! - see what I did there ) about the nut - you'll cut that later and fine-tune it during the final setup. ... and welcome 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tubbles Posted February 12, 2018 Author Report Share Posted February 12, 2018 Thanks, that's helped a lot! So in which case, I should be locating the fretboard so that the two Es are in line with the lowest bridge saddle position, then the rise of the fretboard towards the centre can be dealt with by just raising the individual saddles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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