Neck pocket help

[Lizardhands]

Hey,

Finally got round to routing the neck pocket out for my 6 string bass, templates all set up etc. Disaster struck on the last pass where my router proceded to litterly tear a 3mm chunk of wood out of one of the sides.

As this now means that when ive straightened the edge up the socket will be way to loose, im planning to widen the other side by the same amount for symetrys(spelling?) sake then put in a off cut from the ebony fringerboard on each side plane it down plush with the top, then reroute.

Will this work well?

Cheers for any help

Dave

[Curtis P]

so your going to use a peice of ebony for a shim?

If so, that might work, i would glue it in really well

Curtis

[frank falbo]

You can use ebony and you'll probably be fine, and it will look cool. But I'd use a piece from your body blank. You don't want to put a thin piece of wood in there that will not match the expansion and contraction properties of the body wood it's joined to. That's already a spot for movement, evidenced by the little finish cracks everyone gets around there. If you don't have any body wood left use something similar. If you want to put ebony in there after to hide the joint like binding or purfling that's okay. Then you can make it more obvious, like make a mitered edge rectangular border all around the end of the fretboard. To me that would make it look more "intentional" than just filling in the sides.

[Belial]

I make a similar mistake with my strat when doing the neck pocket on it. Instead of trying to straighten up the pocket and shim it, I used glass bedding for gunstocks and dyed it to the same colour as the wood. It worked out great, very little work involved.

[JPL]

My boo boo was a little different, I routed way too deep and had to find a way to fill in a major space. The picture below shows my solution, I'm not sure what effect it had on the tone and I'm not particularly proud of it but it still sounds good so it must have worked out ok.

[daveq]

Drew - that looks great!!

I'm still not convinced that glue / lamination really affects much of anything on a solid body electric. If it sounds good (it definitely looks good) who cares.

[tsl602000]

Drew,

Sorry, I can't see the screw up... guess that's a compliment....

[VanKirk]

Yeah drew! That looks cool. Doesn't look like a mistake to me. That neck heel looks really comfy to play on

For the pros around here...

If lizard's neck pocket mistake is too large could you even all the edges of the pocket and glue in a new block of wood (same wood as the rest of the body) and just re-route? Would this make it more stable than a shim or not worth the effort?

[frank falbo]

That's okay too. You could also route a "center strip" all the way to your first pickup cavity. You could even do that in the same wood as your neck, so you give the appearance of a deep set-in neck. Or fill the strip with a piece that has a couple laminations on the sides of your neck pocket. So you'd have a center piece with striped laminated sides. There's tons of ways to get fancy with it if you want. I like that "extended neck joint" look on a 6-string.

[VanKirk]

Thanks Frank. If I screw up my routes badly you've given me a cool idea to just fill the srew ups with some cool wood to make it look like it's a set-neck or even a neck-through and just reroute the new wood

That makes me feel better knowing I have an option if my first project gets totally hosed.