I took the plunge last night and tackled the hard part, getting the bridge and neck mounted in proper alignment. I say I tackled it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I accomplished it. But I did get them attached to the body, and while I was at it, I also attached the pickguard, control plate and strap pins.
The body I’m using came with the through holes for the strings already drilled, but not the mounting holes for the bridge. It was also drilled for the neck, but the neck itself was not drilled. So the big challenge was to get the bridge and the neck lined up with each other and then screwed to the body while still in alignment.
The way I went about that was by putting on the two E strings, snugging them up a bit, and then checking that the strings were correctly located on the neck without being too far to either side. Once I was confident that I had them lined up correctly, I used an awl to mark the holes for the bridge. Then I drilled the holes and screwed the bridge down, and used the now attached bridge to line up the neck so I could mark where the holes needed to be in that. Once I had those holes marked, I drilled the 4 holes in the back of the neck and screwed the neck onto the body.
Now that I had the neck and bridge attached, I decided to go ahead and mount the pickguard and control plate to get them lined up properly too. I ended up with a slight gap between the pickguard and the end of the neck, but that’s probably due to the way the control plate fit. And since the control plate has to cover the access hole, there’s really no leeway for moving it around much. No matter though, the slight gap doesn’t bother me, and if I decide it shows too much, I’ll take it off and paint the small strip of wood that shows black. No one will ever see it.
It still needs a nut and a jack plate, and it still needs to be wired up, so there is plenty to do before I can fire it up and see how it sounds. In the meantime, here’s what she looks like right now.
