It's been a while

A lot has happened since my last post. I completely finished the "wood block" project, and it turned into a gigantic hack, which is probably why I didn't write about it. Essentially, I never figured out how to use the router bit, I abandoned the poplar wood block, and instead used a small piece of wood (Mulberry, I think) left over from when we trimmed down my son's hockey stick. It seemed to work, but it is very ugly, and I probably could have gotten away with just epoxying in the ferrules for the bridge. I did learn a lot though, and it seems to be holding. However I woul be too embarrassed to let anyone actually see what I did. Maybe I'll post a picture of it some time.

As that story wound down, I found myself wanting to get a better neck, so I ordered a very nice Vintage something or other neck from Warmoth. It's quite gorgeous, and I just installed the Sperzel tuners from the Mighty Mite neck in it. I won't go into much detail on that. I tried to create a template by making a photocopy of the Mighty Mite neck, but it turned out that the copier doesn't exactly duplicate the size (or else the back of the neck isn't totally flat). In the end, I used the "put tape on the back of the neck, press tuner in to make hole, drill hole". This worked ok, though I had to do a little fiddling to make the tuners line up nicely.

Lining Up



The neck fits nicely in the pocket.  But the holes don't line up!   After asking on strat-talk, and  measuring a few million times, I decided to plug the holes in the body and re-drill.  I had a 3/16" dowel and I used it, despite the fact that I probably should have used something with the grain going the other way.  It was quite easy and not worth saying anything about.

To make a template, I first tried doing a pencil "rubbing" of the neck, but then switched to using a photocopy of the back of the MM neck.  This seemed to work well, without the size problem mentioned above.  It lined up will with the actual neck, so I know it's ok.  Here's a picture of the result

Screw Sizes


Now my problem is this.  The pre-drilled holes in the Warmoth neck look like they're around 3mm.  This is entirely consistent with the information on the Stewart-MacDonald site, which says to drill the body to 5mm, and the neck to 3mm.   I measured my neck screws, and they are 0.164 in diameter, which means they are a standard #8.  It turns out that screw numbers are related to diameters by this formula

diameter = 0.06 + number*0.013   (valid for 1 <= number <= 10)

I still haven't found out much about the origin of these two magic numbers.  Aside from the #10 coming out to almost exactly 3/16", none of these numbers are interesting when expressed in inches.  And none of them is interesting in millimeters.   0.0.13 * 3 * 100 is around 4, so 0.013 ~ (4/3)/100 - so what? There's some information in a wikipedia article that looks relevant, and I suppose I'll read it eventually :-).

I posted a question on strat-talk asking what size to drill the neck holes, and I'll give it a little time to get some responses.  So far, one guy said to use 1/8", which is 3.18mm.