Even Crappier

After a huge amount of measuring, I successfully used the Rockler thing to drill some holes, inserted the ferrules, and it looked great.

Then to my dismay, I found that one of the holes was not positioned correctly.  I could have avoided this with a simple measurement, as Mrs Caster pointed out in a nice way.  So then I tried to remove the ferrules, and cracked the body. I decided to go back to square one, and destroyed the body further when extracting the ferrules.

Very disappointing.  I ordered a replacement body from GFS (actually not quite a replacement, since I had to get Surf Green instead of Daphne Blue).  I also ordered a plexiglass template from stewmac so I don't have to worry about this again.

The biggest worry I have is whether I really had to do the hockey stick thing.  I can't quite face doing that again.  Bleh.

It's pretty clear from the picture that these aren't lined up.  I don't see what I didn't notice that before hammering in the ferrules.  The holes came out pretty nicely though.

Crap

Tonight, as part of installing the bridge, I decided to attach the neck.  And ... the holes in the neck and those in the body don't line up.  Rats.  I have to assume that the holes Rob drilled are correct, and I should probably make some changes to the body. From looking at the neck plate against the body, it seems pretty clear that the holes aren't right.    The last time this happened, it was with the Mighty Mite neck and I plugged and redrilled the neck.  But I don't want to do that on this primo Allparts neck.

I found a thread on tdpri on just this topic.   Here's the final post in the thread:

Throw a pick guard and neck pickup on first and get the lay of the land. Sometimes fixing an error is easier if you locate the error first.

If it came down to a little wood off the body... no big deal.

Drilling the neck to fix the problem is the worst thing to do. Those holes directly affect the strength of the joint. Unless you are going to use cross grained dowels and epoxy... your just making it weaker.

jspotts... you are absolutely correct. Enlarging the the holes in the body is the correct approach... these are clearance holes and have almost no influence on the strength of the joint. In so far as moving the neck plate 1/16" of an inch... who cares? As long as it's not skewed... it won't look wrong.

My bet is the pickguard will show you the body is big. 5 minutes with a Dremel or a sharp chisel (anybody remember those?) and your set.

The body holes should be drilled to 11/64" (spec)... 13/64" would be no problem at all. And if the screw threads drag on one side of the clearance hole... again no problem.

As Bolide has said... wouldn't be a bad idea to see where the bridge is sitting too...

If I do this, the challenge will be to figure out where to drill on the body.  This post, also from the same thread, seems like a good way to do it:

I had a Strat neck and body with a similar mis-match. I picked the neck as the correct one. I plugged the body holes with dowel. I cut drywall screws (coarse threads, pointy ends) to about 1/2-inch long and hand-screwed them backwards into the neck holes, so the pointy end stuck out about 1/8-inch. I fitted the neck in the pocket and pressed down. The four points marked the locations of my new body holes. Bam!

Drywall Screws

It seems that drywall screws are great.  I found a page, courtesy of Smith Fastener, with information about sizes, particularly the diameters.  I'll want a screw that doesn't enlarge the hole, but that fits snugly. According to the fine folks at Guitar Nucleus, neck screws are #8 x 1 3/4.   The Smith Fastener page says that drywall screws do come in #8.  So I guess I need #8 coarse thread drywall screws.

Next Steps

Now that the block is in place, I can install the bridge.  This is a scary part for me, as I need to figure out how to be sure the ferrules are in correctly, and once they're in, les jeux sont faits, as we swamis say.

I read a post by Ron Kirn where described his approach, which I think can be explained like this:

• Put the bridge in place, and move all the way to the left.  Draw a vertical line along the edge.
• Do the same on the right
• Push the bridge as far as possible towards the neck.  Draw a vertical line along the edge
• Do the same, pushing away from the neck

Then the idea is to center the bridge horizontally and vertically, based on the lines.  I haven't figured out the most practical way of doing this yet - I'll have to look at the bridge. How about this

• Push bridge all the way to the left, draw vertical line along edge
• Push bridge all, draw vertical line along edge
• Draw line exactly between the two
• Do the same thing but on the horizontal axis

Once I have that done, I'll attach the neck to double-check that things are lined up ok:

• Attach neck
• Put on low and high E strings loosely
• See how it looks with the bridge on the middle lines
• Measure to check scale length

Once that's ok, the big question is where to drill the holes for the ferrules.  On the horizontal axis, that's easy - it's just the midpoint of the areas where the post will touch the bridge.  Vertically, it's tougher, but I can probably do it by taking some measurements of the post when screwed into the ferrule, looking at the distance from the circumference of the ferrule to the circumference of the circle where the bridge touches the post.  How in the world did I do this last time?!

Routing and Gluing

The routing went pretty well. One problem, which I knew about in advance, is that the router won't really go deep enough.  To get around this, aside from removing the springs from the router attachment, I had to route out extra space on the left and right sides so that the chuck would fit in the space, and so the router could go deeper.  Bleh.  I would have been much better off with  a real router, but I needed something cordless (maybe I should buy a long extension cord?).

So, without further ado, here's what it looked like when done

Here it is with the wood  block glued in.  Yikes, that left side looks terrible.  It's partially due to the camera angle, but I wouldn't have had this happen if I'd had a real plunge router.  Oh well.  OTOH, the piece fit in very snugly and it's a much better job than the last one. To protect the wood, I put on a few coats of clear polyurethane.

Here's a picture from the front, with some lettering from the hockey stick still intact. The block sticks out a bit into the body but I don't think it's enough to cause any trouble.  If it is, I'll have to shave off some of it, which would be a drag.

Getting Ready To Route

My experiments with that crappy body worked out pretty well.  I realized that if I removed the spring from the router I could get more depth, so I did that.  And I bought a second bit so I could be sure it was as sharp as possible. I also realized that I need to cover a bit more area on the right (as seen from the back, or else the post hole wouldn't hit the block. To guide the router, I taped some pieces of wood to the back of the body, and tomorrow's the big day.

The task will be even more exciting because I have new safety goggles and a new respirator.  The last time, I skipped using goggles because mine were so crummy, and my eyes felt weird for a few days.  So clearly that was not a good idea, and I found some cool DeWalt goggles.

Screw Sizes

One of the most widely read posts on this blog is on the topic of screw sizes.  If you don't recall it word for word, it is worth re-reading it now.  It is now obvious to me that the correct formula is

               diameter =  
where N is the number of the screw. This is rigged so that a #1 screw is 1/16 inch, and #5 is 1/8 inch. And amazingly, a #10 comes out to 3/16 inch. Incredible. So in a nutshell, we start at 0 being 1/16 and go up by 1/16 for each 5 numbers.

Ready To Do Some Work This Weekend

You'll recall that my last post ended with this cliffhanger:

I need to buy some more stuff

• neck plate and screws
• strap buttons
• Volume/Tone/Blend knobs
• string tree

So, first off, let me resolve the tension I created last time.  I've obtained all of this stuff ... and more. In particular, I've ordered some genuine Fender (c) white felt washers, and also purchased a cordless Dremel (foreshadowing).  However now that I think of it, I need to get some longer screws for the strap buttons, as recommended by someone on Strat-Talk (perhaps Ron Kirn), and quoted by me in a previous post.  Hurrah.


Routing


A critical part of my build is installing the wood block under the trem.  The el cheapo body I ordered did arrive and is perfect for my purpose of learning how to do the routing.  Here's a rough picture of the part of the body that I'll work on

Think of this as looking at the bottom of the body, sighting from the end towards the neck pocket.   The bridge posts will sit on the top of the shaded part, and the "empty" part has already been routed out.











The diagram is a cross section of what you'd see if you had a little camera in the spot routed out for the trem block, pointing towards the neck pocket.  I need to rout out a piece that is 2.25x1x(1.022-0.125), i.e. 2.25 x 1 x 0.897.  The depth comes from allowing 1/8 inch of the original body to remain.  The spec for the trem says that the ferrules are 0.886 long.  Using the theory of subtraction, 0.125 of this will be in the Paulownia, and 0.886 - 0.125 = 0.761 inch will be in the block I glue in there.  As a bonus corollary, the "perfect" block size would be 2.25 x 1 x 0.761.  Perhaps later I will post the actual measurements of the mulberry block I'm using.  It's pretty close, just a bit deeper which isn't a problem.


The Jig Is Up



The piece of wood taped on the body was my first attempt at creating a "jig", i.e. something to guide the router so I don't cut too far.  Really it's more important to get the sides right, so I guess I'll tape on two more pieces perpendicular to this one.  I bought a piece of 1x2 from the local lumberyard.  In the process, I learned that any NxM piece of wood is not really NxM inches, since there's "shrinkage".  For example, a 1x2 is really 0.75x1.75.  I had planned to do the routing with my trusty corded Dremel and the new plunge router I bought And in fact, I did do some, out in the hallway, however my son, Stratos Jr., suggested that it might annoy our sensitive neighbors (who have in fact complained about other noises from our apartment). Then Mrs H4x0r chimed in, leading me to sulk for a while.  I then ordered the finest cordless Dremel money can buy and went back to sulking. It arrived a few days and it looks nice, though it's kind of heavy compared to the the corded one, probably due to the massive battery.  My plan is to do all my routing on the roof (I live in an apartment, so the roof, to which I am lucky enough to have access, is a big flat expanse with a few picnic tables which I can use as workbenches).


Next Steps


Now that I have all my goodies, I will proceed thus

• Tape two more wood strips to the body to guide the router on the sides of the hole
• Go up to the roof and rout the cheap body (bringing the dust buster for clean up of course)
• Assuming that all works ok, do the same on the Paulownia body

If I had to bet, I will only get through the first two, and the third will have to wait for next weekend, which is the start of my being "on holiday" as they say in Weehawken.