Fit
The body was shaped and all parts were ordered. To start bringing things together, the next step would be to carve the pocket for the neck joint. You may wonder if starting at the neck is an arbitrary choice.
Could you also route the pickup pockets or attach the bridge, first? No, you should not do that. It would be very unsafe to do so and here is why.
What you need
neck pocket template
router
silhouette routing bit
drill (press)
20mm forstner bit
consideration, practise & precision
Theory
The fit of the neck onto the body will help to determine the final orientation of the vertical line, which is running through the center of the guitar. It serves as a symmetrical axis along which both pickups and the bridge will get placed. Secondly, the farther the neck is placed into the body, the farther down along this axis the bridge will have to sit. Precise bridge placement is crucial, because any neck is constructed to fit a certain scale. The scale of a guitar is the distance which is enforced by the interval of frets on the fingerboard and may therefore vary depending on the neck you bought.
Scale is measured from the nut of the neck to the saddle of the bridge. In the following post, I’ll dig deeper into how to get the scale measurement right. Theoretically, you could measure it all out first and then implement your concept in an arbitrary order. That is, if you have a steady hand and trust you won’t screw up sticking to those measurements.
So for all the above reasons, you’ll be much safer off getting the neck pocket done first and go from there.
The fretboard needs to stick out above the body by a distance large enough so that the strings will travel above the pickups. But the neck has to be sunk in deep enough for the strings to maintain an equal distance to the fretboard (action). Your bridge will likely allow for some minor adjustments of the action. Since the depth of my neck matched a Telecaster’s neck, it was easy enough to find the right measures.
It’s worth achieving a tight fit for your neck pocket. This will maximize the resonance transmitted through neck and body. It also ensures that your neck cannot wiggle inside the pocket. For obvious reasons, this would affect your guitar in keeping its tune.
Practise
Due to the variety of neck sizes out there, I was unable to find a template for my guitar neck. That is why I carefully had to craft my own. Unfortunately, I missed out on taking pictures of the creation process. Check out the resources down below for guidance. You can also find some personal insight into template making in this post.
With all things considered, transfer the pocket shape to the guitar body using a pencil, while taking into account the aspired vertical axis of your instrument. You should then start by removing the rough majority of material for your neck pocket by using a drill press and a forstner bit. This will help to conserve the sharpness of your router bit.
Alternatively, you may also route the neck pocket in several shallow passes. Yet, this may increase chances of having your template slip. Similarly, be extra careful when drilling close to the boundaries of the pocket. Any time you roughcut pockets using a forstner bit, take into account that these have a spike at the tip of approximately 2.5mm length. Thus, factor in some buffer distance when setting the depth on your drill press.
Once that’s done, apply your template and route to precision.
I was too nervous to perform this operation on the actual guitar body right away. To boost confidence it’s worth testing it all out on a piece of junk wood first. For safe joining of both components, align the neck above the pocket. Then tilt the neck upwards slightly, such that only the frontmost portion of the neck is touching its silhouette on the body. Begin pushing down in this orientation. Keep pushing while rotating back.
Inspect the fit visually for gaps. If you don’t see any and the neck doesn’t wiggle, stand up the assembly. Grab towards the bottom of the neck and lift. If you did well and the fit is tight, nothing should come apart.
