Hello all, So I'm going through my first build still and I'm running to an issue. Somehow I think I messed up my scale. My neck is mostly done and my pickups are routed and the body cut out. Problem now is that where I measure for the neck to sit and the bridge to sit would bring it up to a 27" or so scale. This should be 25".
So I could move the neck further into the body, but then that puts the heel below the top of the guitar body. Is there a way that could work? That doesn't seem right to me.
I could keep the neck where it is and trim off a bit more of the tail of the neck (the few inches of exposed wood below the fretboard) but that would put the bridge really close to the bottom pickup route. This seems worse to me.
If I chose to move the neck lower which puts my bridge where I originally calculated, how can it work if the heel is below the body? CAN the heel be below the body?
Is there another move here?
See pics below
Edit: I think I know where I went wrong. I kept all 24 frets and didn't compensate for the longer neck when I was drawing out my bridge and pickup placements..... oops
Can I ask, which part doesn't match your drawing, the body or the neck ?
Maybe you could reshape the body by cutting the end of the body back to let the heel protrude a bit and keep the crucial 25" scale length.
Or, you could fill in the bridge pickup recess and route a new one closer to the neck pickup. The bridge would maybe cover most of the filled in piece.
That's an interesting idea. So to do that I would cut out a pickup shaped piece of wood and glue it in and sand it down?
Exactly that. Use an offcut from your body blank, you might be lucky and find a bit that almost matches the grain.
Actually, now that I look at it, this doesn't seem too horrible..... I think the may be the easiest method to reshape on this line. Does that jive with you?
That would certainly be the simplest. You could make it a bit more curvey. You could continue the outer radius, centred about the selector switch hole, until it meets the line you've drawn. Then add another little radius to smooth out where that arc meets your drawn line.
. I think that’s my move. Thanks for talkin this through with me!
Your welcome. It'll work out just fine.
Most of the time there are multiple ways to fix a problem, a lot of the time there is at least one way to fix a problem, and there is very little of the time where problems can’t be fixed.
Robin’s suggestions are valid and sound. Rock on! 🤘😁🤘
Make guitars, not war 🌍✌️🎸
@somethingnicer Here's what I did on my latest les paul type build.
You can also slice off the lower half of the heel and glue a longer piece on, even add a thin piece of something else to make a feature.
You can also shorten the tongue that goes into the pickup cavity and alter the end of the fretboard if needed to make it all fit.