Great stuff Tim, Must have taken a lot of your time to post the essay!. Everything you say makes a lot of sense to me and I sincerely appreciate your advice. I have done a dummy assembly using clamps, so the next trick will be to temporarily attach the neck to the body, line up and temporarily attach the bridge, temporarily attach the machine heads, line up the strings and pickups and scratch plate, temp screw down the scratch plate, then pull it all down and commence the fun part - Sanding! I am in no hurry, so will post a progress report some time down the track. Thanks again, Cheers, Jon W.