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.