27" Baritone JZA-1

[kuanjb]

Dowels can be quite obvious if you're staining, as you'll get the end grain on the dowel taking up a lot more of the stain than the rest of the body (apart from starting out a different colour). You could slightly countersink the dowel and put a round cap of ash veneer on the top to help it blend in a bit better.

I was actually thinking the same thing. I'm going to be removing some wood for the controls so I might be able to salvage some of it to plug the holes.

But it's not going to be easy to remove that neck pocket section in a single piece. You can cut down the sides but you'll need to chisel the remaining block off, and the wedge effect of the chisel is likely to end up with the block splitting along the grain. Also, cutting will remove some of the wood, so, certainly at the sides, you may have quite a gap to fill. Better using epoxy than wood glue for that as wood glue becomes weak once you can see daylight between the surfaces to be glued.

You're of course right. I had thought about the loss of wood at the edges but had hoped the angle of the cuts could gain a bit of what would be lost, and could even cut wider since I'd be routing out for the pickup anyway. But, even if that were to work there's still the problem of cutting along the bottom. I'd originally thought of using a dremel but that would still be 1 mm higher than the bottom and would lose another mm from the cut.

So, plug and redrill it is. I'll try and cut out some of the wood for the controls and use that for plugging the holes.

Thanks for the suggestions.

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[Simon Barden]

All the best!