First build question

[Mb534]

Good afternoon, 

I am building my first guitar, more like assembling my first guitar from various parts I have accumulated from Ebay. The body I have was described as a BC Rich ASM1 has a squared neck pocket, however, both necks I have the heels are rounded. One neck looks like a strat neck the other looks like a Jackson/Charvel neck. both necks are 24 frets.  ( the body originally had a 24 fret neck on it) Question 2 when the necks are put into the pocket it seems the fret board will cover part of the pickup ring. is this an issue?  My first reaction is that I will need to fill in the neck pickup hole or possibly slide the neck back slightly.  

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

[ScottR]

Could you possibly post a few pics so we can see what you are looking at?

SR

[curtisa]

46 minutes ago, Mb534 said:

when the necks are put into the pocket it seems the fret board will cover part of the pickup ring. is this an issue? 

Only if it stops you putting a pickup in the neck position or the look of it bothers you

 

46 minutes ago, Mb534 said:

My first reaction is that I will need to fill in the neck pickup hole or possibly slide the neck back slightly.  

You're putting together a guitar using dissimilar prefab components, so there's a risk that what you're building is not going to just 'work'. The biggest issue I see is that the necks you're using may not be matched to the scale length used when the body was made. The original bridge will have been placed at the scale length of whatever neck used to be fitted to the body. There's no guarantee that your new necks will match that same measurement.

You can check to see if there's a close match. Take one of your necks and measure the distance from the nut to the 12th fret. Double this measurement. This new value is how far the nut of the neck must be positioned away from the bridge on the body in order for you to have any chance of the guitar intonating correctly. More specifically, it's the length of the string between the leading edge of the nut and the point where the string leaves the saddle on the bridge (minus any adjustments made at the saddle to compensate for intonation corrections).

If you want to keep the bridge where it was originally on the body then you must move the neck to maintain this 2x-nut-to-12th-fret distance; the scale length. The relative position of the neck in the pocket will be limited by this measurement. If the neck needs to move closer to the bridge to maintain the overall scale length, and there's no room in the pocket to move backwards then you're going to have to deepen the pocket to make it fit (and consequently make that pickup overhang problem worse). If the neck needs to be positioned further away from the bridge to maintain the scale length then you'll need to make sure there's enough meat in the neck pocket to support the neck (and possibly deal with an exacerbated gap at the bottom of the pocket if the fretboard overhang starts to expose it).

If you want to position the neck in the pocket such that it's exactly where you want it irrespective of where the bridge currently sits, and the resulting scale length imposed by the neck means the bridge is now in the wrong spot, your only recourse is to reposition the bridge to a new location governed by the scale length of the neck.

You may have no issues whatsoever and everything just falls into place, but you'll still need to do a bit of homework first to find out if there is any work required in order to pull it off. I wouldn't expect to drop a Ford engine in a Honda Civic without at least modifying the engine mounts