When thicknessing a neck blank I always leave an extra 1mm, so if aiming for 21mm at the 1st I'll take it down to 22mm. You can lose 1mm easily by the time you've radiused the board and carved the neck. 

For rabbiting bits I use radian but cheap ones can work well, they just don't tend to hold up as well, go blunt quicker in my experience. 

Regarding the veneer I don't foresee any issues if it's properly glued down, you can get tear using a router no matter what you're doing. It's just part of the risk. 

I prefer to use a palm router for most stuff, I've added a 200mm square piece of 10mm acrylic so it's extremely stable. I fond using a standard plunge router very tricky doing any edge work. 

For neck pocket depth, I do the pocket a little shallow, fit the neck then run a straight edge from the nut down over the scale line and measure the height at bridge position. I can then use that info to work out how much lower I need the pocket. Remember to allow for string height off the fretboard. (Frets plus string height off the frets)

If you go to deep just add a shim to tilt the neck slightly down and create more bridge height. A lot of fender type guitar often had bit of credit card in the neck pocket lol

Could you explain what you mean by shimming it please?

Thanks again, that makes sense.   I will have to wait until I have bought a fret board before I can move the neck on.    The drop top I bought is very nice but the 2 halves are slightly warped.   Is there a good way to flatten them before I join them ?  DO I need to steam them somehow & clamp them flat ?

Thanks for your response Benjamin.

I have bought a 5mm maple top & will add that to the front.    Maybe I'll use the veneer on the rear.   I'll procrastinate on it for a week ....

In relationship to the neck thickness, I'm planning to make the profile of the neck similar to my existing telecaster which is a MIJ Jerry Donohue model which has an unusual slightly V shaped neck, which I personally like.  Therefore should I just take the neck blank down to a thickness that when adding, for example a 6.5mm fret board on would make the neck the same thickness as that on my JD Telecaster ?

Regards

Rob

1.   I have a poplar body blank & also some 1mm booked matched maple veneer which I was thinking of using on the front.   Is veneer wise to use on the top of the guitar or is it better to use something thicker to avoid tear out with the route. I wood use a drop top  4mm to 8mm, 1mm of veneer is quickly sanded away.

2.  I want to add some fake ivory binding round the body & was looking at rebating router bits.    I realise that stew mac do some router bits designed for this job but they are expense (to me at least) for a first time builder & this may be the only guitar I ever build.  I see other cheaper rebating bits, which I get aren't going to be as good because "you get what you pay for", but they make too big a cut for the binding I have.  Is there an easy way to make them take less of a cut ?  Maybe wrapping something round the bearing or packing out the guitar body to get the bit further away from the body. Look on alie express or amazon for a cheap one if only use is for 1 time, if you’re going to use this router bit more often, buy a good quality one.

3. When I look at my neck side profile template the part that bolts to the body has a depth of 23mm.  I plan on using a finger board glued on this.  When I measure my Tele (maple neck) the thickness here appears to be about 27mm.  This implies that the finger board would only be about 4mm thick in the centre, which when considering the radius would mean that at the edges the depth of the finger board would only be 1-2mm which just seems wrong because the fret tangs must be deeper than this. I've been looking at plans but there doesn't ever seem to be any info on these dimensions. Could anybody shed any light on this for me please ? the fretboard minimum is 4.5mm but this is not recommended. 5.5mm/6.5mm is ideal. At the first fret with the fretboard glued on, we aim for 21mm, and at the back we aim for 23mm. Although you can adjust this to the player's needs.

 hope it helps