PRS-1H Build (My First)

[Andy40]

lol nice FW

[Andyxlh]

Oh that's good!

[thyoungscientist]

This a mock build of my kit, The neck fits, but has just a little bit of wiggle room,
I have started sanding, (Sorry no pictures), and is turning out well I sanded the veneer down to 400, as I did with everything else, I thunk I might stay with the pickups, but I am thinking of replacing the bridge.

[Marcel]

Hmmm...Interesting... looks like you got chrome hardware... mine came with Gold hardware..

My neck fit gave me only a few mm of movement at the nut of which I needed to use nearly all of it to get the neck straight along the centre line. Be sure to have some temporary 'E' strings on when you set the neck else you may find that one of the E strings will leave the fretboard at the 24th fret. Had I glued my neck In the 'relaxed natural' position of the neck fit I would not have been able to use the high E above the 12th fret as there would not have been any fretboard under the string. When setting my neck and to get the temporary stings to sit correctly all the way down the neck I had to push the nut "up" (towards the low E) as far as it would go and then clamp the neck in that position.

Also the heel of my neck doesn't traverse the entire neck PU cavity. I inserted an appropriately sized wood filler block into my gap and glued it in which essentially joins the neck heel block and the wood between the PU cavities. I figure in some ways it may improve the strength of the neck join and may possibly affect sustain but mostly it makes sure that when I set the neck the string length is as close to ideal as I can make it. If you have a close look on my build photos (any I build with a set neck) you can see the 'neck end gap' in the neck PU hole that needed filling. I'll include a photo here which shows the 'block' more clearly...

[thyoungscientist]

Does the end of the fretboard have to line up with the start of the neck pickups cavity?

[thyoungscientist]

Also what bridge would you reccomend for this

[Fretworn]

Does the end of the fretboard have to line up with the start of the neck pickups cavity?

The simple answer to this is no. It is more important to make sure that the scale length is correct. There are a few posts that cover neck positioning in detail on the site, but essentially the distance from the inside of the nut to the middle of the 12th fret on the high E string should be the same as the distance from the middle of the 12 fret to the bridge on that string.

(See Gavmeister's post attached for details.. http://www.buildyourownguitar.com.au...ead.php?t=1895)

[thyoungscientist]

Is a Gotoh Wraparound Bridge Good?

[thyoungscientist]

How do you know it is the correct scale length

[Marcel]

How do you know it is the correct scale length

The only way is to get an accurate 1m or 36in ruler and measure it.

Popular practice is to measure from the fretboard side of the nut to the PU side of the strings point of contact on the 12th fret, then double that figure to get your specific scale length.

The high E will often be very close to exactly that scale length figure that you just calculated, however due to the different thickness of the string the low E will usually be 5mm or so longer. This difference in length is needed (because of different thickness's of the strings) and is the reason why the bridge (or saddles like on a Strat build) often appears to "lean" slightly away from dead square to the strings.

Typically if you place the fretboard (when you set your neck) so that your scale length on the high E string falls approximately centre (or slightly fretboard side) of the adjustment range of your bridge then when it comes time to tune and intonate your build all your 'adjustments' will come together nicely and fall about mid range. Ideally this will also have the end of the fretboard very close to lining up with the PU cavity although it is not always the case.

On my PRS-1H build I did all those calculations and measurements and it worked out for me that the fretboard is about 1mm shy of the PU cavity, which leaves me with some handy shoulders for the PU rings to rest on and a fraction more wriggle room when mounting the PU's..... but as for how it will ultimately tunes up I won't know until I get some strings on it, which I suppose is the challenge we all face in building a guitar ...