Just about ready to glue the neck on our ESB-4 but have found that the neck angle is too shallow. Should I attempt to take material off the neck to fix the angle or buy shims from Stewmack?
Hi Eric and welcome. To me it looks like the strings are sitting on the fretboard, which would indicate the neck angle is too steep, and not too shallow.
I'm not familiar with the bridge used on the bass, but it must have height adjustment screws, so the first thing is to see if you can raise the bridge height up enough so that there's sufficient string clearance.
Also, how straight is the neck? It will need to have a slight concave bow in it when set up at the end of the build (which will raise the nut end up slightly and so increase the action over the end frets), and once all the strings on and up to tune, this will help create the bow. It may be that the neck currently has a back bow, which will require loosening the truss rod to cure. For any initial set-up, using the truss rod I'd get the neck straight as possible it's under no tension, so that stringing it up will introduce a slight concave bow to it.
The StewMac shims are meant for bolt-on necks, whilst your bass has a set neck, so if the angle does need to be changed, you''ll need to use a different solution.
But I'd first look at what can be done by raising the bridge height and checking the neck bow.
If you can take a few more pictures from different angles, also showing the whole neck and how the neck fits in its pocket, that will help.
Thanks for the reply, yes the strings are laying on the fretboard so the neck angle is too steep.
The good news is that we figured out the problem and all is good. You can see in the picture that there is about 1/2 inch of neck and fingerboard that extends past the neck pocket and lays on top of the body. This section was not allowing the neck to seat completely into the pocket and therefore making the neck angle too steep. We took a dremel tool and trimmed that area so that it did not contact the top of the body and now the neck angle is correct.
The mock setup looks good now so we will go ahead and glue the neck. I will post another picture when I get the chance.
Thx,
Eric
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