Fine Radius Adjustments on a Fender LSR Nut

The action on the low-E string of my LSR nut was a little high.  I think it's because the nut's supposed 9.5" radius doesn't match the fretboard's supposed 10" radius at the nut, or my alleged fret leveling job, which might very well have changed the effective radius of the neck.  Either way, the low string was way high.  I decided to explore a theory.  No pictures because my crappy old camera won't focus on anything so small.

No warranty, expressed or implied.  Proceed at your own risk.  Good luck.

Here's what I did to lower the action on a string.  Seems to have worked for me, except that this operation seems to have wrecked some of the springy retention ability of the retainer prongs.  I will have to be careful when changing strings forever more.  I think if I had removed the nut completely and taken the retainer finger assembly off in one piece, that might not have happened, but imagine what a pain in the ass that would have been!

1. Place the guitar on a nice smooth surface covered neatly in cloth.  The little ball bearings, once lost, will never be found again if they bounce on something hard.
2. Loosen the string and pull it aside into a neighboring string slot.
3. Pry the retainer prongs back toward the headstock a little.
4. Use a slightly-magnetic awl tip to draw out the two ball bearings.  Grab them between your pinched fingers before you lift them very high, and put them in a container.
5. Use a drill bit slightly smaller than the ball bearing cups to deepen the holes that hold the bearings.  Measure forty five times and cut twenty times.  Go a little at a time.  You can't go back.  How do you know where to put the holes?  I dunno.  I just leaned the bit into the corners ever so slightly and drilled.
6. Replace the bearings, replace the string, and tune to pitch.  If you are convinced you need to go deeper, do so.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here's what I did to widen the string slots on the LSR nut.  I'm using a set of very heavy strings (12's) and I've been worried that the low string was hitting the edges of the little exit slot.

1. Steps 1-4 above
2. Use the awl to pop out the little foam dampener on the headstock side of the nut, and place it with the ball bearings.
3. Sand away with a tiny rectangular file.  Don't wreck the retainer prongs.

Your mileage may vary, especially considering that I'm just making all of this up.

The Armrest is Finished

Here's the completed guitar.  It was done a while ago but I didn't post for a long time.  This photo was taken at work by a coworker.

You can see how the upper rest has been bent almost parallel to the body.  I did that with a bench vise and a bad attidude. 

What else did I learn?

1. More composites in the neck, or none at all.  The neck is strong but I'm not sure it's much better/different than a wood neck.
2. Keep knobs farther away from the bridge.  Sometimes during extended palm-muted riffing sessions, I find I've nudged the bridge volume down with the back edge of my hand.
3. I've always hated the G string - it sounds nasty on every guitar I've ever owned.  But on this guitar it doesn't, because somehow the composite neck is eating those frequencies and damping them down.  It's so pronounced that I've noticed the G string has less sustain than the others.  This is kind of cool but I'm not sure it's all good.  Some fret positions on the G string die out quicker than I'd like them to.
4. The balance of the guitar is excellent with respect to the leg rest.  I record with this guitar exclusively and whether I use the strap or not it stays where I put it when I'm sitting down.
5. The arm rest is still a lot taller with respect to the bridge than most other guitars.  But it works well.
6. The EMG 81 TWX and 89 XR pickups sound very nice.  It's a pretty non-resonant, clinical sounding guitar and the pickups convey that accurately.  I've never played any other EMGs so I can't tell you about the X thing.  The guitar sound itself sounds sweet enough in neck single coil, fat and nasty in neck humbucker mode, brutal and cutting in bridge humbucker mode, and thin as all hell in bridge single coil mode.  The neck single coil mode evokes enough of that strat neck thing that I'm very satisfied with it.  The middle position doesn't do much for me; mixing the two pickups in single coil mode doesn't evoke any of the sound of mixed neck/middle on my G&L S-500.  So...
7. Based on all that, next time I'd skip the dual mode pickups.  The dual mode pickup in the neck position is probably more than I need, as well. I should have done single 80X/SAX/SAX, I think. That's just me.  I love the strat single coil sound in the neck/middle positions, and I love humbuckers at the bridge, and that's all there is to it.
8. Battery life is nuts.  I've had two batteries in there in the past 6-7 months, and I only changed them to see if a new one sounded different - it didn't. 
9. I'm glad I made it funny looking.  There are quite enough strats, teles, pauls and prs's in the world IMHO.
   

Even Dunner (or...How I Bent My Rod with a Hickey)

So my friend Tom lent me his 1/2" Hickey EMT bender.  I attacked the 1/2" aluminum rod with it.  It was not pretty but here's what I ended up with:

That's one single piece of aluminum.  If I can, I'll bend the armrest in toward the body more.  But it's not happening tonight.  How's it work?  The leg rest is awesome.  The armrest is a bit tall and it doesn't seem aesthetically pleasing, exactly.  But hey.  What're you gonna do?  That thing's permanent.

Intonation - the 12th Fret Harmonic vs. the Open String

The question I tried to answer today is, "Which is more better?"

• Comparing the note at the 12th fret with the harmonic at the 12th fret, or
• Comparing the note at the 12th fret with the open string

Today I set the intonation on my new guitar for the Xth time.  I have a Peterson Strobostomp, which is good because neither my ear, nor a needle tuner, has ever helped me intonate a guitar.  And I couldn't tell see much difference between the two methods.  I think the reason is that if the intonation is already close, the harmonic and the open string are converging somewhat.  Who knows?  It's such an inexact thing.  My favorite E-form barre chord sometimes sounds good to me, and sometimes sounds horrible, when played up the neck.  That can change from day to day.

I tried hacking the G string compensation a little by increasing it arbitrarily, because it seems like the G is the primary culprit in spoiling my perfect chord.  I've heard of studio musicians doing that when they know exactly what intervals, and where on the neck, they're planning to be.  I think experienced luthiers, guitar techs and musicians consciously or unconsciously "sweeten" their intonation, and they're not telling me how it's done.  I've read that experience musicians of the fretless persuasion (eg violin) adjust their intonation dynamically, like magicians.  

I'm trying to work up a system for hacking intonation that works reliably, and when I do, I'll post it.  It'll be something along the lines of:

1. Play your chord or group of notes where it needs to be
2. Strum repeatedly and silence different strings in turn, looking for the one that's ruining it most for everybody
3. Use the regular guitar tuners to nudge that string up or down a little at a time (basically make it out of tune) until it plays better with others
4. If you sharpened it, decrease compensation for that string beyond what is normal, and if you flatted it increase compensation beyond what is normal

Also I just realized that I might be able to do something using just the tuner:  hold the chord up where I need it and, in effect, see how far from equal temperament perfection each note is.  That's basically simple intonation, but maybe it changes the equation when all the strings are fingered?

I am a monkey.

Strange High E String Failure Mode

I've heard it said of tremolo use and Kahlers in particular, that guitar string windings at the ball end should be soldered.  I always wondered what the heck that was about.  From what I have discerned, Kahlers have fixed saddles and wrap the string ball ends around a semi-circular rotating stop, similar to Bigsby tremolos and, in a way, to some wrap-around TOM (Tune-O-Matic) fixed bridges.  And there, I thought, was the crux:  something about turning a corner with the wrapped end perhaps caused problems.

Now maybe I understand.

I lost the ability to maintain tuning on my high E string on my new homemade guitar.  Every time I did a bend, it came back low - and it's a fixed bridge.  It happened over and over and over.  I even loosed the Steinberger gearless tuner at the headstock, unclamped the string, grabbed the free tail and reclamped it with the slack taken up.  It kept happening.  Here were my theories, in descending order of probability:

1. string clamp mechanism slipping - but I didn't see any less tag end than I remembered having after the initial string installation
2. string stretching like all getout - but I couldn't imagine a string stretching that much without breaking
3. tuner shifting in the soft basswood of the tuner hole - but i saw no visual indication of it
4. adjustable saddle moving of its own accord - but I checked the compensation screw head and it was against the rear of the bridge
5. bridge moving - but the other strings were great

Then I measure the wrapping at the ball end where it comes through the rear of the bridge.  I measured 19/64ths, worked the string by bouncing the guitar on it repeatedly.  I measured 16/64ths, but I didn't believe it.  I stretched the string again and it became clear:  the high E string was getting pulled around the ball end and  smooshing the wrap toward the ball end.  In this picture you can see it:

Imagine for a moment that I had a camera made after about 2003, that could take a picture worth a damn.  You would see that the green arrow is approximately where the final wrap used to be, and the yellow arrow is where it is now.  Between the two is kinked-up string, unwrapped wraps that have wriggled out of the wrap zone.

From now on I will solder my strings, I guess.

The Guitar with the Finish (but not the Finished Guitar)

After weeks of applying thin coats of wipe-on poly I got enough layers on there.  The poly is not mirror smooth - that happens later, after the poly has cured (2-4 weeks, and/or until the smell disappears), when it's wet-sanded and buffed.  Who knows if I'll even bother doing that?  In the photos that follow, you can see the ripples in the poly.

The headstock with the Steinberger gearless tuners and Fender LSR nut. I've been slacking the strings, adjusting the neck relief with the truss rod, and re-shimming the nut each time.  What a pain in the sack.

The battery is wrapped in blue electrical tape, both to prevent it from shorting any contacts, and because CVS batteries are Not Very Metal.

Six-bolt neck attachment:

I still haven't figured out how to bend the 1/2" aluminum rod. I'm working on that.  It may involved annealing the metal with a propane torch (until the carbon in a Sharpie line fades out).  I've located a machine shop very near my house, but I haven't given up yet; I've managed to do just about everything by myself so far.

Poly Wanna Slacker and Extreme Glueline Remediation

So I've been putting wipe-on poly on the neck (about 10 thin ones or so), and, after letting the Danish Oil dry for nearly a week I put a couple coats on the body as well.

Then I got tired of the glue line on the sides of the body, so I cut a 1/4" x 3/8" fillet.  You can see I dipped into a control cavity.  That's cool.

I turned my router into a self-contained router table, and tie-wrapped it to the legs of my band saw for stability:

I clamped a guide to the band saw table to make a 1/4" strip of oak.  I had to sand a 64th off it despite my careful calibration and testing of the guide.  I set the strips into the side fillets with Titebond, which is way, way too thick for this kind of thing.  I clamped up in the middle first to drive out the excess glue, which sorta worked, then used my only two long-enough clamps to get the all-important ends (I don't want glue showing there) and put weight on the middle with dumbbells.

This means I'll have glue to clean up on the body.  I'm hoping the few light coats of poly already on there makes it not stick so good, and that the sanding required to bring the oak strips down to level doesn't wreck the danish oil finish.

I really want this thing to be done but those glue lines were bugging the hell outta me.  I couldn't leave it like that.  Couldn't.

Finishing Up and the Aluminum Silhouette

There's nothing to photograph lately.  But I've taken the whole guitar apart again to apply finish to the neck and body.  For the neck:  Watco Danish Oil.  It's a penetrating, hardening type of varnish.  For the neck: Minwax Wipe-On Poly (gloss).  It's basically a pre-thinned poly that goes on in fine, controllable layers; I picked gloss not because I want the shine, but because satin finishes are "satinized" by the addition of stuff (silicates?) to gloss finishes.  I figure it's better without stuff in it.

The world of finishing can be pretty confusing.  You got shellacs, polyurethanes, other polys, varnishes, and multiple type of lacquer, including nitrocellulose lacquer which is traditional for old guitars.  I literally surfed for 6 or 8 hours before settling on the two I picked.

Currently I'm sanding like crazy.

Also I took delivery of 4 feet of 1/2" aluminum bar stock.  The idea is to make the rest out of it in the form of a guitarish outline.  Unfortunately the stuff is hell to bend - I've got nothing that works on it, and I'll have to go in search of a bender.  On the other hand, if it survives the bending process it'll probably be strong enough to handle the day to day battering a guitar gets.

More soon.

Closest So Far to Being Done With This Guitar Part IV!

Okay, control cavity covers.  Working with acrylic is a pain, but not as bad as the hardware store guy made it sound.  I used a rabitting router bit to make the inset or whatever you call it, then I laid the acrylic on the cavity and drew the pattern, then I cut it with a hacksaw, then I sanded it until it fit as good as it's going to.  The downside: doing these three cavities probably took me 5 hours.

You can see where the two cavities join.  The cavities connect this way because my guitar-designing skills are not so powerful.  And that shitty battery is fabulous-looking, no?

I made the front jack cover the same way but with aluminum.  It's gnarly because I didn't want to buy a flat of aluminum wide enough, so I pounded a piece of angle flat.  Yeah!  Also note the switch mount.  The dominant artistic theme that I'm trying to evoke here is "crudely-formed pieces of aluminum screwed randomly to a brown block of wood." I think I achieved that look perfectly.

The knobs are certainly not final.  See the master volume to the side of the bridge?  It's different because the other kind wouldn't fit there.  Genius! Also those speed knobs look shitty on this guitar.  I'll be searching for something a bit nicer.  Or making them, more like.  Another adventure.

Playing Impressions and To Do List

To get the neck pickup working I had to flip a connector that I had wrong on the EMG pickup buss.  Then everything was well.  This guitar sounds good - the neck and body don't resonate much, so it has acres of sustain.  Also because of the lack of resonance, it lacks a certain amount of "tone".  It's a little too clean and plain.  But you know what?  I mean to do that.  That's why I picked a composite neck, thinking that the two materials (wood and fiberglass/epoxy) would fight each other an resonate with nothing.  It's why I picked a solid bridge.  It's why I picked EMG pickups - for their low string pull.  It's why the body is a large, very thick slab of what passes for mahogany these days.

I wanted a guitar primarily for high gain chord work, with massive sustain, that could do some nice cleans, and I think I got it.  I've decided to concentrate all the controls in the main mahogany slab.  That will give me the freedom to do whatever I want with the body shape, or even leave it the way it is (though I would like an leg rest and one for my arm as well).  Why shouldn't my guitar be a block with little sticks hanging off it holding up wood bits like a Tinker Toy atom?  Let everyone else build more Telecasters and SGs and LPS and Strats and whatnot.  Make mine different.

Now I have to do a bunch of things, and in order not to waste strings, I have to remember to do them all at once:

1. Cut the humbucker springs by 1/3 or so, particularly the neck
2. Mount the pickup selector mini-switch (a DPDP on-on-on strapped into SPDT center-on) on a piece of aluminum near the master volume
3. Mount the output jack.  It can't go on the end of the guitar because I want this thing to stand up when I lean it against something.
4. Route reliefs around the rear cavity edges to receive cover plates - at the same time I ought to clean up the cavities and make them even
5. Fix up a dead note up near 16 or 17 on the high E, where the edge of that fret is way too low.  I missed this in leveling and I'm not sure how I want to fix it:  I can re-level the frets (then re-crown them and re-polish them) or I can level just the upper half, sloping down gently, like some instructions say.  The problem with that second one is that if I do that, and it doesn't get enough material, I'm in trouble.
6. Thin the back of the neck?  I've got about 10/64s back of the truss rod, and the neck is thick.  If I had had to force relief into the neck with the rod, it would be pushing on that material, but I think it's pushing on the other side instead (because the strings are acting on the neck well).  Still, I think I'd rather be safe than sorry.  The neck plays well.
7. Figure out what to do about rests for leg and arm

All Together Now! A Guitar is Born...

I drilled a 3/8" hole with a spade bit from the neck pickup to the bridge pickup for the neck pickup wires.  Like a true genius I allowed the drill bit extender to gouge the surface of my neck pocket.  It looks crappy but no harm done I guess.  Dang.

I drilled 5/16" holes for the control pots.  The top one will be the master volume, and it will have a switch next to it.  The others, behind the bridge, are individual volume/tone pairs for the pickups.

I routed like a fiend, using the same template I used for the pickups.  I cleaned up some messes with a good sharp chisel (my new best friend in the shop).  The bottom cavity is for the master volume.  Are you wondering what that semi-circular relief is for?  Thinking maybe it's clearance for a potentiometer?  Think again - it's damage from an angry router bit that I prettied up somewhat.  Wonderful!

Here's my genius pickup mounting technique.  I made aluminum bits to span the pickup routes and function like a pickup ring does.

EMG solderless wiring is pretty cool.  Again, the uninhabited cavity on the left is for the master volume when I receive it in the mail.  And the pickup selector switch when I figure out how to mount one.

The guitar body assembled:

I played it.  The bridge pickup is working and the neck pickup is not...time for troubleshooting.  It sounds very nice, I believe.  I'll reserve judgement until I hear the neck pickup.

Pickup Routes and Bridge Hole Fix

I screwed up the location of the bridge.  I had it about 2 mm too close to the bass side.  This was forcing the roller adjusters on the treble saddle all the way to the edge, putting a sideways bend in the strings over the saddles, and pissing me off.  So I got myself a 1/4" tapered plug cutter and made 6 plugs - because the plug cutter doesn't make them deep enough go all the way down the 1/4" holes I redrilled through the existing screw holes.  Then I put Titebond in each hole, put one plug all the way down (forcing it with the end of a 5mm allen key and a hammer), and repeated with half off another plug (the thicker half - remember, it's a tapered plug cutter).  About a 1/16 of an inch remained above the face of the guitar body as the glue dried.

The it was time to make the pickup routes.  I found this very difficult.  First I attempted to make a template from a piece of scrap drawer-front oak I had around:

The plan was to draw the pickup outline and, because I only have a 1/2" diameter flush-cut router bit, drill 1/4" holes in the corners first to more correctly match the pickup corner radius.  Well, all that was doable, but when I routed the center of the oak, things went sour.  I gouged it up, it tore chunks from the grain - it broke my template.  So I set my sights on something a little more tractable: 1/4" luan plywood.  Easy to work, I figured, and strong enough to run the flush-cut router bit against.

I didn't cut the pickup ears into the template.  That I'd do later.  I stuck the template to the guitar body with double-sided carpet tape (wonderful stuff, wish I'd discovered it sooner!) and pre-drilled the 1/4" corner holes.  Then I went to town with the router:

Then I put the pickup into the hole upside-down and marked the ears.  I used a 3/16" brad-point bit to rough out 3 small holes inline in the outline.  Then I whacked it with the chisel, which I had to sharpen; the long piece of glass with sandpaper glued to it proved excellent for this, in fact that's what I'll probably use that glass for in the future - 3 or 4 sections with different grits.

I'm tired.

Fret Leveling

My pickup-expectation paralysis broke finally, today, and I decided to make myself useful.

I used a cheap 24" foot aluminum level for this job.  It has a nice straight edge, and it's just a bit longer than the fretboard.  I got some fabric carpet tape, which is advertised as being easily removable.  I already had some 320 grit sandpaper.

I put the carpet tape on the level 1" strips of the sandpaper onto the carpet tape.  I adjusted the neck as flat as possible.  I began to take run the level across the frets, making every (poor, I'm sure) attempt at preserving the conical fretboard radius.  I got it to where nearly every fret had a flattened top except for the bass side of the second, and a couple up around 17/18.  Those weren't getting touched.  To go faster, I used the same course file I used for fret end trimming.

Finally, they were all flattened to some degree.  Then I marked them with black marker and used my fret crowning file to make the fret tops round again.  I'm glad I bought that one file.  I couldn't have done the crowning without it.

Next is to dress the fret ends and polish the frets.

Here are a couple of sites that do a far better job of describing this than I can:

http://www.skguitar.com/SKGS/sk/fretcrowning.htm
http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com/repair/acoustic-guitar/fret-leveling.php
http://www.stevesguitarsite.com/FRETLEVEL&CROWN.HTML

Attaching the Neck, Stabilizing the Basswood, and....Guitar?

I took the day off today because I've got a couple days to burn before the end of the year.  Also I was hoping the USPS would deliver the EMG pickups.  Alas - they did not.  My postage consultant drove right on by without even providing me with any junk mail.  I swore out loud, loudly.

Saturday and Sunday I attached the neck using 10-24 steel threaded inserts from McFeely's.  The reasoning here is that the basswood is soft and shreds easily:  the last thing I need is for the neck screws to tear right out, despite the structure provided by the composite layers.  I would use 6 inserts to spread the load even more.  The thought of this operation had me sweating and twitching, because I would be drilling 6 large holes in the heel of my neck, the neck that has taken me 9 months to make, and there would be very little chance of going back if I goofed it up.

I drilled through the body  into the neck, then widened the holes for the inserts.  Driving the inserts in was an imprecise process and it pushed some of the upper-layer basswood around, but nothing fatal.  I countersunk the body for the screws, which I alluded to in a previous out-of-order post.

Then I put some of that thin Zap CA around the threaded inserts and into the tuner holes to stabilize the soft basswood - worked fine, though I did have to run a solvent-wet neck bolt into the inserts to clear out some CA/sawdust crust.  I also hit the screw holes for the LSR nut, but I tested that process on 1/16" holes drilled in a piece of junk laminate - I didn't want to find out that the CA completely plugged them.  I needn't have worried.  Thin doesn't even begin to describe that stuff.

So here we are, Monday.  After I didn't get the pickups, I sulked for quite a while.  My whole day - ruined!  Waaaaah!

Then I got to work.  Time to string this thing.  I had a set of D'Addario 10s around for my S-500.  I reinstalled the saddles that I removed from the bridge in order to screw the bridge to the body.  I installed the LSR nut with all 8 provided shims, after reaming out the 1/16" screw holes to clear any wayward CA.  I installed the tuners after reaming out the holes again with a 3/8" bit to clear out the CA crust. The tuners took me a while to figure out but ended up performing perfectly.

Then I tuned the guitar by ear to my S-500.  I tightened up the truss rod to take out the relief put in by the strings (I'm grateful the strings are able to work the neck).  Bridge:

Nut and headstock:

Truss rod spoke nut:

Neck bolts:

And...guitar?

How does it sound, without the pickups?  Well, it sounds thin.  I'm not impressed.  But when I push on the body (into the carpet or the top of the work bench) to damp it down, it deepens up nicely.  Clearly I gotta put some more heavy wood on this thing.  I was toying with the idea of making a Steinberger inspired body, but that clearly is not happening, and not just because of the resonance.  I'm not comfortable with how it rested in my hands.  So it's going to get more guitarlike.  But I do like the face that it's square on bottom, so it doesn't fall over - that's what I've always liked about the Vs.

Body Shaping and Headstock Thickness

First I had to make the headstock thicker for the tuners.  1/2" wasn't going to give the tuner nuts enough to grab onto.  I epoxied a layer of 1/16" basswood onto the face of the headstock in an interesting fashion:

I figured I'd add to the front face of the headstock because I already had some extra string break angle over the standard Fender headstock.  This addition is raised and might look interesting.  Why not?  We'll see how it goes.

Then I set about to fix up the mahogany body.  First I sanded the glue drippings off the join lines.  Then I opened up the neck pocket for high-fret access.  Then I evened up the end of the body.  Then, because the body is 2" thick, quite a bit thicker than your average, I graded down to the neck pocket.  I did this with the bandsaw and a 1/2" skip-tooth blade.  For the first time I felt I really understand what a band saw is all about - this was like doing geometry, like sculpting with a laser.  The combination of easily-sawable wood with a blade perfectly suited to the task is a dream.

The end of the body is about 1" thick, which is the thickness of my S-500 under the neck pocket.  I re-cut the countersinks for the neck bolts.

Doesn't that look cool?

Mahogany Body and Neck Pocket

I want the center core of the body to be a good solid type of "tone wood".  I went to the local Ring's End and they had 3 feet of 5/4 by 6" mahogany.  I don't know mahogany but this stuff looked nice to me, and it is moderately hefty.

I cut it in half and glued it to itself with Franklin Tightbond.  I didn't do a very good job.  That stuff went on like peanut butter and I slathered it.  When I clamped, the boards started sliding off each other.  I ended up drilling a couple of small holes in each end (very fast) and inserting some thin smooth bolts through the holes (tightly fitting), then piling a bunch of weight on the resulting stack.

The glue line is thick as hell.  It left some annoying gaps around one edge.  I'm going to have to fix this up somehow.  But it's not going anywhere, I think.  I know there's enough glue in the center.  There's nothing simple for me - I can't even glue a board to a board without getting all turned around and confused.

Then I cut the neck pocket.  I started by placing the neck on the end of mahogany, centered it, and drew some outlines in pencil.  I freehand routed a quarter inch down inside these lines, try to draw good clean edges, until I realized that would never, ever work - I was going to put it into the wall and wreck the pocket.  So, like usual, I made a jig:

I always make a jig.  Viewed one way, this whole project has been an endless succession of single purpose jigs.  I made this one by clamping those two long boards to the sides of the guitar neck at the heel, laying it on the body core, and clamping and nailing everything together like a Rube Goldberg device.  You can see where I had to hack away chunks of the crosspiece to make some router base clearance.  I extended the pocket about a centimeter to make room for the truss rod spoke nut sticking out the neck heel.  Here's the completed neck pocket with the Freud 1/2" flush cut top-bearing router bit:

The neck fits well.  Not only well - it fits beautifully.  It fits so tightly and firmly that I feel like I have no right to such a wonderful neck pocket, not the way I cut it:

Then I ordered parts for the next phase:  attaching the neck to the body and installing bridge/pickups.  I'm going to use threaded inserts for this because I don't trust the soft basswood with bare wood screws.  I had some brass ones lying around, and I'm glad I tried installing one in some scrap neck laminate, because it broke off at its drive screw slot.  Brass is no good for this.

I ordered a box of 10 steel threaded inserts from McFeely's, 10-24 with a 5mm hex drive and 9/32 outer hole size.

I ordered two pickups through Amazon:  an EMG 81TWX and a 89XR.  These are both dual-mode pickups, each containing a humbucker and a single coil in switchable arrangement.  They come with push-pull volume pots to toggle between modes, as well as active tone controls and all the wiring I should need.

TOTAL COST SO FAR:

$592 - Previous steps
$38 - 3 board feet of 5/4 x 6 mahogany
$24 - flush cut router bit
$5 - steel threaded inserts
$260 - EMG pickups
-------------------
$919 total cost so far


OUCH.  I figured I'd spend about a grand.  But actually doing it is totally depressing.

Nut and Tuners

I finished cutting the nut slot to width for the LSR nut.  I used a pull saw to get it close, and a file with masking tape on its short side to get the width correct (so I could take off material on the vertical face of the slot, without digging it any deeper).  I used needle files to flatten the bottom of the slot.  By the time I'd finished, the fit was tight but i'd undercut the slot on the bass side toward the first fret, just slightly.  No big deal I think.

This nut doesn't have fore and aft pressure on it like a locking nut, even thought it might look similar.  The nut has little pairs of ball bearings for each string to slide upon. So the two provided screws, tiny though they are, will hold it fine.  The instructions say to use some weird-ass drill size, and only that size - the danger, according to the instructions, is in twisting the screw head off.   I used a 1/16" which is a few hundredths too small, because I always think I know better.  It worked fine.  I put a little fishing reel oil on the threads before I put them in.  I used all of the shims provided.  If that's not enough, I'll make my own shims out of feeler gauges.

Then it was time to mark the location of the tuner holes.  The first method I used worked very poorly:  it consisted of push pins with fishing line between them running in the approximate position of real strings.  It was too hard to eyeball the lie over the nut angle, and too hard to mark the lines on the headstock under the fishing line.

Next I made a jig to suspend a length of aluminum angle stock over the neck from the heel end, and taped a piece of paper to the neck with the correct string spacing (gotten from my G&L S-500, which has nearly the same dimensions).

I used my trusty 6" ruler to drop the vertical down to the paper on the heel end, and to the headstock in two places on the other end.  This worked well because that ruler centered itself well in the ball bearings of the nut:

The I double-checked everything and made the lines:

You can see my attempt to sanity check the spacing.  I put the line delineating the row of tuner hole centers across the string lines, then measured the distance between each of the holes. I was a little annoyed and disturbed by the fact that they weren't perfectly regular, and that more importantly that the intervals got bigger going toward the nut/bass side.  Then I realized they should get wider because the string lines are a wee bit farther apart toward the nut, as they converge from heel to nut.  Okay.  Good enough?  It had better be, let me tell you.

Basswood doesn't like to be drilled.  It shreds a bit.  The tuner holes are 3/8", as specified by the StewMac instructions for the Steinberger Gearless tuners.

I brought the neck upstairs to look at it in daylight, thinking that it was nice-enough looking to be treated like family, finally.  It was at this moment that I nearly lost it:  I realized that the direct line from the nut to the centerline of each tuner goes right through the string-clamping knob on the tuner to the left, if that clamping knob comes to rest perpendicular to the string lie!  I was all like, "Oh BLEEPETY BLEEP BLEEP, you BLEEPETY BLEEPER!"

I was stumped and very worried.  I searched the internet to little avail, but did discover many pictures of these tuners on standard Fender 6-in-line headstocks.  I compared my headstock to the S-500, and it looked very similar, both in tuner spacing and cross-string angle. Yes, I could put some other tuners on there, but these things were bloody expensive!  WTF?  I clamped a string into the bass tuner and discovered two things:

1. Probably, if the clamping knob is perpendicular, I can muscle it around another quarter turn to make it parallel
2. Because of the peculiar spaghetti-slurping operation of these tuners (pulling the string down into a hole), the clamping knobs wouldn't always be in the full down position - room for strings to go under them

I'm relying on point 1, because point 2 depends on it - wouldn't want to tighten a string, dragging a clamping knob down into the next highest string and bollocksing up the works. I think it'll be okay.  

The nearly-completed neck:

Next I'm going to start working on the body.  It's time to:

1. get this thing strung up and arranged properly
2. pickups in
3. frets leveled
4. intonation and setup
5. take it all back down and put it into its final shape, which means headstock shape, proper contours, body shape
6. finished all wood parts with whatever stains or coatings I decide to apply

I'm ordering the pickups in the next week or so.  The bill for that ain't gonna be pretty.  More later.