Routing Accuracy...

I'm looking at making a couple of bodies, one a semi, albeit Tele shaped and bolt on neck, to replace the rather ugly one listed below, and the other a 66 shaped body to replace that on my low-to-mid range Strat. I fabricated the neck pocket last time, but now I have a router, so a template seems indicated.

So naturally I took the neck off the Squier as a model. The inch by quarter inch bit of veneer as a neck shim was a surprise, but, OK carry on. We won't mention the very non parallel screws or the unevenness of the bottom of the pocket. Next I discovered that when they sanded the neck mating surface it didn't end up flat, there's a low spot on one corner.

Anyway, cutting the template against published dimensions I couldn't get a fit. It turns out that the corners of the neck don't seem to be correctly radiused. That's odd, I thought, and went to the body again. And yes the body pocket has 1/4 in radius. So how did the neck fit I thought, and checked the fit. And in spite of being amazingly sloppy it didn't fit - there was a gap at the end hidden by the fretboard extension. So now I am making a template to reshape the neck so that it's good to use as a template to cut a template to route neck pockets!!

So what do we learn from this? Not to expect too much from a budget Squier which in spite of all this was/is a perfectly acceptable cheap guitar. Not to worry too much about the odd stuff up perhaps, and a degree of surprise about how much hand work there was in a Squier that I don't think is that old. Oh, and in 'Fender' s' defence I have a suspicion that some of the pocket issues might be a subsequent owner, not the factory.