neck geometry...

[mistermikev]

so laying out my geometry for my les paul esque angled neck.  it occurs to me that really any angle would work as long as the neck is sunk deep enough into the body to aligh it with the top of the bridge at its lowest.  it also occurs to me that the angle cut into the top of the body won't ever actually reach the bridge pickup if that angle is aligned with the bottom of the fretboard.  makes me wonder... I think there is an angle to the bridge pickup ring no?  anyone know this angle?  ideally both pickups should sit on the plane that would be parallel to the strings (in gray below). 

obviously one can sand down the pickup ring to make an angle.  begs the question, what is your approach to mitigating this? 

hehe, just asuming this pic means anything to anyone but me...

the cream is the body with a 7/8" top.  the gold is the neck wood and it ends at approx the end of the neck pickup, brown the fretboard 27.5" scale length.  the grey area is the plane I would put in the face of the body - removing all material higher than the top edge.  the darker grey is a 14mm height gotoh bridge (anyone confirm this height?)

[mistermikev]

edit edit... ppps... looking online it appears that the typical is that the plane does end halfway between bridge and neck pickup.

Can't help but think I'm overlooking something.  (usually when I think that I am)

 

so looking at this:

 

and thinking (.383 - .176) =  .207....... .207/1.75 using an online degree calc 6.75 degrees?  seems extreme.

sorry, just thinking out loud here

 

[Bizman62]

2 hours ago, mistermikev said:

hehe, just asuming this pic means anything to anyone but me

Looks almost like something I might have drawn with Paint!

The neck ring should be similar to the neck break angle and the bridge ring the neck break angle plus the angle put into the body for the pups to be in line with the strings.

[mistermikev]

55 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

Looks almost like something I might have drawn with Paint!

The neck ring should be similar to the neck break angle and the bridge ring the neck break angle plus the angle put into the body for the pups to be in line with the strings.

hehe, yeah, didn't spend a lot of time making it pretty... just trying to see where things will lie. 

right... the neck pickup ring s/b no angle... I don't know why they put one on.  If you are planing the body at the same angle you plane the neck... it should be parallel (doesn't everyone use the sm angle there?)  so I have no idea why they would put an angle on that. 

The bridge... I guess they go 6.75degrees as it should never be more than that.. and you just have to sand it down... but yeah, if you do a 4 degree pitch it needs to be at 4 degrees in theory... I guess since it's just a few degrees it doesn't matter that much, but I have seen some cheap les paul copies where it isn't angled... and we don't want that!

thanks for the reply biz

[Bizman62]

If you're nitpicky about the right angle, attach the ring tops to a straight piece of something, long enough to lay flat on the fretboard end. Then draw a line parallel with the top on the sides of the rings. Simple as that!

[mistermikev]

not really nitpicky... just want to know it so I can plan for it.   

I guess the top on a less paul is usually an arc due to the carve - so at the end of the day I'm likely going to have to sand the bridge ring to match that arc anyway...

At the end of the day this thread was really just me working it out.  Sometimes committing to writing it down flushes out the understanding... this was one of those times for me.  I do appreciate you playing along tho!

[Bizman62]

17 minutes ago, mistermikev said:

I do appreciate you playing along

Heh, that was fun, and it was just for fun I played along. I had never given a thought for the mechanisms involved and since you gave me a reason to ponder upon this very "problem" I gladly jumped at it.

[mistermikev]

I guess we both come away with something then.