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If you are wanting a tele neck, then just buy one. There are so many out there and so reasonable in price. I have built 30 guitars from raw lumber. When I built my tele style instrument, I did not even think twice about building the neck, why?? You can buy one, have it delivered in a few days and bolt it on---duh.

If your saddles are correct and the frets have a good crown on them and your strings are good then all you need to do is tune the E A D B E straight up on your tuner and temper the G string a little flat, working with it until a C chord and an E chord sound decent to you. Remember that the guitar is a tempered instrument and does not play perfectly in tune, only close. There are other factors that will cause intonation problems, flat frets, defective strings, bridge saddles improperly adjusted, ecessive finger pressure etc. Make sure you have all that taken care of.

Don't use super glue unless you don't ever want to have to go to the hassle of removing the nut again! Use a very small dab of Franklin Titebond--white woodworkers glue. That way, all you have to do is just lightly heat up the nut and it will come right off with no damage to it or the finish or the wood around the nut slot. If you must use super glue, just put a minute dab on either side of the nut---DON'T just squirt it on and let it run in the gap!! If you are dealing with a Fender style nut, then don't use super glue. The nut will most likely break upon removal. This is info gleaned after installing and removing hundreds of guitar nuts--use it however you like.

Sounds like the Gibson pu is worth more than the guitar. Best to remove the new finish down to the old finish and then take some rubbing compound and see what the old finish looks like. Leave it on if you can. To refinish an archtop guitar correctly is expensive and a lot of work. Don't remove the neck, retighten the neck and don't shave any of the neck down. The guitar will be stronger and sound best with what is there. It is only an Egmond but it does not deserve to be stripped and the neck shaved. Put it back to original.

Best to leave it alone--- Having said that, if you are bent on doing this, then why not do it in a way that you could go back to the original headstock look if you decided to sell the guitar. I would just sand the finish VERY lightly with some 600 paper on a block so as to keep the surface level. Then I would mask off the face of the headstock and spray on some black lacquer. VERY thin so that in the future you could wet sand it off and reveal your original finish/inlays. I would certainly not chisel out inlays and such on this instrument.

Many variables. What guage strings, fingerboard density, neck wood stiffness etc. will all determine how much forward bow after stringing. You may have none!! Seen that many times working on necks. Best scenario is to build a little FB into the neck. A taste of back bow and then level flat. Make sure you prepare a nice fret slot when fretting or the neck will back bow when you drive the fret into the slot. After you fret the neck there should be a VERY slight amount of FB when the rod is loose and that will come right out when the rod is tightened. You can get by with a straight neck but your going to have to raise the action until the guitar plays good up to about the 5th fret. A straight neck will usually give lower action at the nut end and higher at the body since you are in essence giving neck "relief" by raising the action. A little FB will let you have a lower action all over the neck if that is what you are looking for.

You can go to the hardware store and buy a cap nut and a regular nut. Thread on the regular nut and leave about 1/8" of thread and then thread on the cap nut. The cap nut will lock up against the reg nut and start to turn the threaded rod into the predrilled hole you made into the body. Use a nut driver to do this. When you get the desired amount of threaded rod into the hole then stop and take a small wrench and while holding the cap nut with the nut driver, loosen the reg nut. This will let you now back off the cap nut. If you just thread on the cap nut without the reg nut under it, the cap nut will sometimes bind on the threaded rod and the rod will back itself out when you try to unscrew the cap nut. This is a convoluted method, but it results in being left with a nice looking threaded insert rather than buggerd up threads trying to turn the insert with a pair of pliers or something. Make sure that you drill a very perfect size hole for the insert. Just large enough for the treads to cut into and not small enough to make it hard to turn. Do a dry run on some scrap before you do the real deal.

The truss rod has nothing to do with neck to body alignment. If the neck came undrilled for the screws to hold it on, then you should have done your alignment before you did your finish work. Take a C clamp and a piece of leather and a flat scrap of wood, put the piece of leather on the fretboard and the flat piece of scrap on the back of the body and then clamp the neck down just snug. Then set your bridge on the instrument. Take two pieces of string and tie them to the bridge as if they were your outside E strings. Bring the ends of the string up to the nut and just snug them there by hand. Look at your alignment on the outside of the fingerboard. Move the neck in the pocket until things line up correctly and then tighten the clamp just a taste more to hold the neck in while you take a neck screw and slide it one a time in the holes through the body to mark on the bottom of the neck where the screws will go and give you good neck alignment. Once you determine that, then you can deal with the neck pocket in as much as shims or whatever. You can always plug the holes in the neck and start over if there is a BIG alignment problem. You can also try the easy way to fix standard alignment problems on Fenders--just unloosen the neck screws one turn, hold the body and whack the neck either up or down to correct marginal problems. Worked for me on hundreds of guitars. If things are really out of whack then return them for a refund.

westtheman I was selling a custom made double neck that I built. When your trying to sell an item that does not have high name recog then you use any method you can. I did sell the guitar for close to a grand which was fine with me. I see where you are coming from if you log onto "Gretsch" and a POS comes up, but when a nice instrument comes up because of some keywords, then that is fine with me. I might not have found it otherwise.

"Weak" spots does not sound to good to me for some reason. If you are going to have areas where lots of wood will be removed for what ever reason then I would go with maple. Yes it is heavy, but you can remove more of it and still have good integrity when you finish. Hopefully your "weak" spots are a result of some sort of outside shaping or decorative foray. Surly your design will be such that these areas won't compromise the integrity of the instrument.

I should probably clarify my use of the word "law" in that this is more of a court decision that Ebay is following. What is wrong with it, is that the company does not have to point out to Ebay why it is disputing your ad. Ebay AUTOMATICALLY pulls the ad, no questions to anybody. You don't get a chance to explain your ad wording and whether you feel like you had a legally correct ad or not. Ebay sides with the company so they will not be held liable. I had an ad pulled just because I did the old trick of adding the words "NOT Gibson, Gretsch, Fender" to the title so that I would attract more lookers who might do searches using those names. Gretsch is the only company that bitched and Ebay pulled my ad and I had to start over with new wording. I don't think it promotes any good will at all among prospective Gretsch customers to do this. I have read several posts on the net from folks ticked off big time about this. I am still a little ticked off at this because it hampered my selling of an instrument. I would not mind purchasing a Gretsch guitar, but I am at odds with them over this policy and it does not make me want to support them, since they were pretty ruthless with me over an ad that caused them NO damage at all to their name. If I can remember the name of this policy that Ebay follows I will post it. Edit. VeRO is the name. Verified Rights Owner. All the owner of a trade name has to do is contact Ebay and allege that you are infringing on their name. Whether you are or not Ebay sides with the VeRO owner and you are screwed. Do a Google search--VeRO tradmark. All sorts of info on this.

I may not be quite understanding your description, but are you saying that as you look at the G and E string at the end of the neck, there is not the same alignment on the outside of each string? If this is what you are talking about, then just take a good sized Phillips screwdriver and back off the screws at the neck plate about one good turn each and then hold the body with one hand and "lever" over the neck until the strings line up like you like. Hold it there and tighten up the screws. You will figure out how to do this with a little trial and error. Sometimes you can just hold the guitar in your lap and give the neck a good whack with your fist in the direction you want and it will stay there until you retighten the screws. The Fender pocket has enough "slop" in it to allow you to adjust the neck side to side a little. On Fender guitars, it is better to skew a little so that the bass strings are closer to the edge and the treble are more to the inside of the frets for some "wiggle" room when playing up high on the treble strings. You don't play up so high on the bass strings so you just sacrifice that. In as much a basses are concerned I would set it up with good eveness from from the edge on the G and E string. Hope this is the info you were looking for.

A customer brought me an old Music Man maple neck bass and wanted me to make it fretless. I am not going to do this to such a classy old bass. It has 4 keys on one side like a Fender. I was wondering if I could just get an aftermarket Fender fretless neck and mount it on the Musicman body. Anybody know if the neck pocket route is close enough to do this. Save me from making a new neck. Thanks.

Very nice body work. I would not have used fir for the neck. Mahogany as you used for the body would have been much better.

Ebay is blindly abiding by a law that allows companies with the ownership of a trade name to protest the noncompliance of the use of that name. All the company has to do is to email ebay, tell them that your ad infringes on their trade name and Ebay pulls the ad! Ebay does not even question them. It is unfair and sucks but Ebay is a money machine, what would you expect. Anytime you list on ebay and use the name "Gretsch" in your ad, it better have to do with a Gretsch product, not something similiar or Gretsch will contact ebay and have your ad pulled.