Leveling the Neck on an Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Frank Pope, FBI Guitars, I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to give you some tips on how to build your own guitar. Now I'm going to be talking to you about how to be sure the body makes good contact with the neck. Again, it's very important to the tone of the instrument that sustain that you're able to get, the difference in a cheap guitar and a great guitar. A lot of that is going to be decided in how firmly and how close the fit is for the neck. For a bolt-on neck such as this, and I should say, by the way, this neck is being built for a gentleman who wants a guitar with a locking string Floyd Rose system where the guitar has no head at all, so it's not broken and I didn't cut it off. It will actually be able to serve as a bolt-on neck, but we utilize this to design the heel...this is a template that you can buy from Stuart McDonald or several other places on the Internet, this is for Fender-style guitars. The top one is for making the heel of the Fender guitar and the bottom one is for making the neck of a Fender bass. They'll fit in any standard Fender body made by them if you make a neck that fits in this template. As you can see, the way that they're used is that the neck itself was designed so that this was traced into the last part of the neck as it was being constructed. Now what I can do with this, I can position it on the body of the guitar and route this particular part and I will know that my neck will always fit perfectly in the guitar when I put it on. For a glue-in guitar neck, it gets a little more complicated and you have to be a little more careful. If you're utilizing a template like this, let me advise you, do not route the part right here for the neck until you have actually made your neck. It may be that you end up making your neck slightly thinner than the cutout that's in this template and if you do cut the neck, you won't be able to make it fit tightly and your guitar will suffer. The best way to fit the neck to your guitar is to make your own template. What you can see here is a template that was made for another neck. I'm going to try to utilize this neck to try to show you how it was made. When you have the finished guitar neck and assume we're going to glue this neck in right now, you place two pieces of wood down the side of the guitar and you will want to clamp them very tightly and then you will glue this third piece in. Now what you've done is when the neck is lifted out, you've created something, you can use two-sided tape to put it on the top of the guitar, you can route this out, and then the neck will glue in and fit very tightly. The way that you make sure that it fits tightly is a neat little trick. Let's say that this is constructed around the end of the guitars right here. Once you make thie template, then if you'll put maybe a 1/4" extra piece of wood inside here you will have moved the guitar forward and because these are converging lines, the type will actually be inside the edges of your guitar. Then when you route it if there's any router wobble, or the blade is a little big, your neck will always fit in there tightly. You may have to actually shave the neck down to make it fit in there, and ideally what you want is a fit where you have to put clamps on the neck to get it to slide into it. Again, my tip to you is to put something in here, maybe 1/4" or 1/8" to make this be just slightly smaller than the body when you route it and you will always have a good neck joint."