YB-4 'Bad Girl'

[WeirdBits]

Check you screw length so you know how far to drill. Minus the head it's about 42mm, which in practice will be less due to the neck plate. So 42-43mm will be safe. Match your drill bit to the thickness of the screw, test on some scrap wood if necessary.





Where possible, I drill the neck screw holes up from under the body while I have it clamped up with the centre line strung (like above), rather than just mark the holes then remove the neck and use a drill press. The latter increases the chance that a screw could pinch in the body and snap… not a happy place to be.

Holes drilled.



Just to be safe I use a nice strong stainless steel neck screw to cut the threads (ensuring it matches the thread of the actual neck screws). Candle wax and slowly does it… make sure you check how far the screws have to go in and mark it before you start.



Threads cut and actual screws in safely. The reason I do this without the body is that if you have a faulty screw that snaps then it's a lot easier to extract and fix when you're just dealing with the neck heel and not the body as well. Been there, done that.




cont.

[WeirdBits]

Time to put the tuners on in prep for upcoming steps. Decided that I wanted to do angled tuners on this as I think it suits the shape. Matching the angles.



Always check and mark the drill depth for the screws so that you don't DRILL THROUGH THE HEADSTOCK. Be careful to match the drill bit size to the tuner screws, as with hard maple it is very easy to snap a screw in an undersized or too shallow screw hole.





Wax the screws and carefully screw them in. Two steps in one step back then move to next screw and repeat until all the way in, is a good way to minimise heat build up and ensure you don't break any screws. All done.




cont.

[WeirdBits]

Time to finish the bridge pup rout. Repositioning the lug holes is the main goal, but the rest of the rout needs some tweaking as well. Line up the template on the centre line and securing fix in place. Double-sided tape and some thin straight edges clamped around it for extra support.



Saving the (mostly) basswood router shavings for any future fill work.



Pickup fits nicely.



Remove the template and double-check everything is square with the centre line.




cont.

[WeirdBits]

Positioning the bridge.

I screwed the neck in place again using my fishing line to double-check the alignment.



Measure the half scale from the nut face to the crown (peak) of the 12th fret (wire), in this case ~432mm. It's always a good idea to actually measure this on every kit rather than just assume as there can be some minor variation, and carefully measuring can help to reveal any faults with kit.



Double the half-scale for full scale, 864mm, and mark. The second line is scale plus 1" to help me as a guide for bridge intonation adjustment. Full scale (864mm in this case) is roughly where you want your most forward saddle positioned, so the bridge gets placed accordingly.



I'm using a Schaller 3D bridge on this which gives you a lot of flexibility but less intonation range than the stock bridge. It also needs to be positioned a lot further back than the stock bridge… like, at the very edge of the body back, to get the range of intonation adjustment that I want. How much further back? None, none more back.



But, there's a problem. The bridge ground wire on this kit runs to the middle of the bridge pup rout…




cont.

[WeirdBits]

Not a problem with the stock bridge, but the Schaller sits so much further back that...



…part of the hole will be visible at the front of the bridge. Not good.



Given that I don't really like where the ground wire comes out in the pup rout anyway, I decided I may as well drill a new, better positioned, hole for the ground wire. Math time.

65mm horizontal run with a 16mm drop.



That should mean a drill length of 76mm at a 13.8 degree angle. The 16mm vertical drop plus the thickness of the drill bit should bring me out around ~1mm up from the bottom of the rout. Hopefully.

The bridge has a riser plate to adjust bridge height, which I may or may not use, but it's handy to check where the wire hole will sit too.






cont.

[WeirdBits]

To help with the drill I cut a guide block with a 13.8 angle, not fool proof but hopefully enough.



Tape the drill at the 76mm mark just in case.



Clamp the guide in place, the holes are for sighting to align with the start and end points.



Success… although it's a 1mm lower than I was aiming. whew!



To plug the old hole I cut a slightly short bamboo skewer to fill the bulk of the hole and then a basswood plug for the visible part at the top.




cont.

[Simon Barden]

That should mean a drill length of 76mm at a 13.8 degree angle. The 16mm vertical drop plus the thickness of the drill bit should bring me out around ~1mm up from the bottom of the rout. Hopefully.

I can lend you my well-trained woodworm.

[WeirdBits]

Plug glued and clamped.



Flush cutting the top with my trusty Dremel.





Now that all that's been taken care of I can clamp the bridge in place and check alignment. E and G strings on, pickups sitting in and bridge lightly clamped in place with a strip of wood at the front and a clamp at the back. Everything looks to line up nicely, string position looks good (although the bridge can be adjusted with rollers) and pickup poles are close enough.






cont.

[WeirdBits]

Screw holes drilled for bridge and pickups.



The neck heel is slightly asymmetrical which leaves a visible gap at the treble corner, so I've added a bit of glue and sawdust mix just to fill it out a touch to close it off.



I also wanted to round and taper the corner of the pocket so it's not so sharp.





The end of the fret board was also slightly angled (before shot)



So I even it out and cleaned it up a bit.



cont.

[WeirdBits]

I mentioned in my first post that the body had some chattering/tearing issues on the back, this is the worst of them but there are several other lesser ones.



Normally, a good heavy sanding would clean up most of them but the one above was too deep. The complicating issue is that I can't afford to sand away endlessly even a 1mm or 2 would mean the cavity cover have to be recessed further which would probably mean my switch block would no longer fit above the pots. So, in the end I wicked in some glue to the above tear and will touch up with timbermate later.

It took a ton of sanding up through the grits to get rid of all the machine marks on the sides of the body, as there were some really rough spots. The end grain is always the worst and there were some very deep lines near where the strap button goes on the tail. Eventually I moved up to 240 grit all over.







cont.