Hello all, i want to build a prs guitar. is there a neck angle / the break angle on a body from the bridge to the neck? (first picture)
and (second picture) is a of build a hinged router sled to get the slope from bridge to neck, is this for making the angle on the body( if there has to be such an angle on the body of a prs).
Thx in advance.
Hi Ben, I will be interested to hear what some of our more experienced members have to say about this one but it seems to me that Picture 1 shows the body to be essentially wedge shaped, rather than the top and bottom of the body being parallel. I can also see on the drawing that the fretboard is almost totally buried in the body, unless I'm mistaken. It just seems to me to be an unnecessary complication.
Brian👍😊🎸
@brie thanks for thinking along, I'm also curious what the experience members will say
Whether or not you need a break angle will depend on the height of your bridge compared to your fret board.
For example, if you wanted to use a tunomatic bridge I think they come out at around a 16mm high, you don't want it dropped right on the body so if you give it 2mm you'll be at 18mm for the string height at the bridge. If your fret board is 6mm, your frets are 1.2mm, and an action of 1.3mm, the strings are 8.5mm off the body. That means you have 10mm you need to make up. The neck can have no angle but there will need to be 10mm of neck showing under the fretboard. That would look pretty rough. So you tip the headstock back with neck angle to give you that straight line.
You can either draw it up on paper, or there are online neck angle calculators that you punch in your measurements and it'll tell you the angle.
For your second point, you have a couple of ways of doing it. I made a sine plate by taking some nuts and bolts, drilling a couple of holes in the top corners in a scrap of MDF the same size as the inside of my router sled and poking the bolts through. Then I can adjust the nuts and by using an angle cube set a solid, consistent angle. The router is still nice and flat but the body is now raised up so it gives you the angle.
Alternatively, you can put the angle into the body first. As mentioned, if the neck is angled your body will have to have the same angle or the fret board will be buried. So if you take a scrap of wood the same height as your bridge and place it where your bridge will be and you have a long hand plane like a No 7, you can rest the back of the plane on the scrap and plane in the angle you need. Once that's done you'll have a reference surface for your router to sit on that will be the same angle as you want the neck to be at.
That was a lot but hope it all made sense!
What I do is to make the front of the heel about 1mm or so lower than the back. Then I clamp the neck to the body and run a straight edge over the frets. Measure at the scale line and measure my heel depth. From there I can get a good idea of what sort of height I'll have at the bridge. Then I can adjust the heel angle if needed and check again.
I like to do this so my bridge isn't sitting way up in the sky lol.
I also like to get the fretboard right down to the body height.
Mark did some live streams to during covid which are all on his youtube channel, building guitars amongst other things. Just pop on the channel and hit the live tab at the top then scroll around to see what might be of interest to you. I learnt how to do a carve top watching them aswell as Marks superbly fast and simple method of carving a neck.
@nsj thx for info, i am still in doubt if i will carve bye hand or use templates.