Checking in from Perth, WA

[NoOneSaidItWasEasy]

Afternoon all, how's it going?

I'm NoOneSaidItWasEasy, and I've been tangled up in guitar leads for more than twenty damn years.

I finally convinced Mrs. NoOneSaidItWasEasy to let me up the collection so I decided to give building my own a crack.

Currently working on a my first build, a standard strat, as I wanted something which was the polar opposite of my current guitars (a well loved '96 wine red Les Paul and a well loved '90something Gibson blueshawk). I'm currently nearing the end of finishing the body and neck but have one burning question -

What do you fit first - the bridge or the neck? Everything i have seen assumes either one or the other is already attached! I'm thinking it should be the neck first as that really needs a solid connection to the pocket, and the bridge has a bit of movement available left and right for string alignment, and then there are the adjustable saddles to fine tune intonation.

Can anyone shed any light on this for me!!!

Thank you one and all!

[wokkaboy]

welcome to the forum NOSIWE (your name is too long to type !),
usually I do a mock build and run some string along both E strings and clamp the neck with the heel butt up to the pocket and make sure the alignment looks ok, which it sounds like it is. Then drill/screw neck in place, then put both E strings on and align the bridge to give equal string offsets on the fingerboard.
Keen to see some progress pics !

[NoOneSaidItWasEasy]

ah right, so you whack the E-string tuners on the neck, clamp it in position, then run your high and low E strings/string/twine/catgut or whatever down to the bridge which is.. roughly clamped in position (check for scale length/left and right alignment), check the neck and string alignment, mark it and fix, then work on the final bridge location? that seems to make sense to me....! cheers!

I'll attempt to set up a progress thread at some stage!
Cheers,

NoOne

[wokkaboy]

Hey NoOne, yep sounds good your method. You can use twine to save using your guitar strings and making a mess of them, or I just get an old set of E strings and use them so you have a fresh set for the final assembly. There may be a test set in the kit

[Simon Barden]

Hi NWSIWE and welcome.

As Woks said, there's normally a set of rough strings that comes with the kit and PBG add in a set of Ernie Balls (which may or may not be to your taste) which are a lot better than the kit set. So use the kit set for initial setting up and then swap to a good set for final intonation.

The important thing to do is to get the bridge in the right place. With a Strat, you can't really go to far wrong with the backwards/forwards location as the trem block limits too much movement, but you need to get the side to side positioning right so that the strings run down the neck correctly, and don't end up over to one side or the other. You might be able to move the neck slightly by easing of the neck screws and holding the neck over to a side to try and correct this, but there's normally only very limited scope. So an initial bolting on of the neck and using strings or twine to set the side to side position is very important.

[Kick]

Haha, welcome NOSIWE

[Brendan]

Welcome along NoOneSaidItWasEasy - great to have you around.

[Fretworn]

Welcome NOSIWE. Enjoy the build.