Help for Set Neck Removal

[adam]

Our friend Frankie (Marrickville NSW) has a set neck alignment issue, which I believe requires a reset of the neck, which has been glued in.

Does anyone know of a good tutorial (video or description) that might be of help here?

I've attached his images

[Rabbit]

Do you know what glue was used? I seem to recall reading that it was possible to get Titebond I to loose it's grip with steaming. I would be a bit worried about twisting the neck if the steam wasn't focused on the neck joint though.

[Simon Barden]

It’s not the neck per se, the bridge holes have been drilled in the wrong place. Or you could say that both the neck pocket and the pickup routs are wrong. But that’s a GSM-1 and I know that the bridge holes on my GSM-1 were drilled 3mm too close together, which I only discovered right at the end. These bridge post holes are only offset slightly. Absolutely ruins an otherwise reasonable kit. You can see the pickups line up with the neck angle. I’ve had to file at the bridge mounting holes to get them to fit on the posts and and cut my own notches in the saddles to get the string spacing right. It’s not great and I’m really not happy.

The neck fitted in the slot really well, and trying to change the neck angle very slightly will require adding veneers and filing away at the neck sides with no guarantee of success. Plugging and re-drilling the post holes is the best course of action, but you really need a drill press (which Frankie has) and then there’s the making good of the finish around the post to do, which won’t be easy to do, but can be done, especially as the displacement is small.

The real solution is for the factories to drill the holes in the right place to start with, but I don’t think they’ll ever be able to do that until they use CNC machines.

[guitalias]

I've not made a kit, but I have made a scratch built body. From that experience I would have thought it better the bridge holes not be drilled at all. Then they can be drilled to suit intonation & alignment of the bridge as part of the build.

[Simon Barden]

Positioning and drilling holes for tune-o-matic (or wrap-over) style bridges is a lot harder than for a Fender style bridge. It's not impossible but you do really do need a pillar drill with a long throat to be able to do it properly, and I certainly don't have one of those. I would, but just don't have the space for one. And a several hundred $$ drill is a big investment for someone buying a $150 kit, just to drill two/four holes. Any holes not at 90° to the plane of the body will have the posts splaying inwards or outwards making it either very hard or impossible to fit the bridge on the posts.

And positioning a T-O-M bridge isn't the easiest thing in the world; it's a lot harder than for a flat plate bridge. You've got the slight angle to get right, and using the bridge itself to mark the position for the post holes still leaves room for error in getting the hole centres correct. You'd really need a basic hole centre template supplied with the kit, but that would only be relatively easy to use on a flat top, not a guitar with a curved top to it.

The factories need to use unworn, correctly located templates and have them used by trained staff. A recent Trevor Wikkinson article said that his experience of the Chinese guitar factories were that they were mainly using unskilled teenagers and people in their early 20s. It certainly feels like that from my kit experience.

[JimC]

I concur that it looks more like bridge position than neck, or possibly a bit of both. The pickups seem to show the bridge being offset. I think I would start by seeing if I could source a bridge without string grooves, or one with lateral adjustment. Schaller do both, but not I think compatible with the existing posts, and being European doubtless come with a really spectacular price tag in Aus.
I would think that if you can find a source of bridges without string grooves at an appropriate price point that would be a useful cure for a number of potential evils. I'm not sure juggled string grooves would get Frankie all the way, but it might be far enough to be acceptable.

[Matezma]

Says this may work for SGs etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HafSxxKPklg

[vh2580]

So little left of field but are you able to measure the distance of string deflection required to straighten.
You could go something like an adjustable roller like the Schaller which may straighten it up a bit. You would need to shorten the existing kit post pins as they would sit in the bridge not through and use the knurl to adjust.( the schaller insert arrangement would be too small for the current holes. Then it would just be the wether the stoptail looks out.

https://www.stewmac.com/parts-and-ha...er-bridge.html

[Simon Barden]

An adjustable string width roller bridge is certainly a nice idea, but probably not that Schaller. Or not without further hardware. The existing kit posts are 6mm diameter, not the 4mm required for the Schaller. And the insert threads are M8, not the M5 the Schaller posts use, so there's nothing to hold the bridge in the correct place (there'd be so much movement available that you wouldn't need to be able to move the saddle positions!)

Now you can get 8mm to 4mm post conversion inserts, so you have a threaded post sticking up like on a Gibson ABR-1 bridge and you'd need a roller thumbwheel. But the Schaller bridge isn't designed to work with that type of post and wheel arrangement, so you'd have to keep reducing the height of the 4mm threaded post for coarse height adjustment and have a very limited amount of thumbwheel travel for fine height adjustment. But that's far from ideal, and it's expensive.

Otherwise you use it and fill the old post holes and drill new ones for the narrower inserts. As long as the bridge is low down (and it should be because the neck angle is hardly generous on the kits), then the bridge should cover up the filled post area.

There is also the issue that the Schaller bridge has a 14" radius and the kit necks are 12". As they are rollers, you can't adjust the saddle notch height, so you are a bit stuck with a slight mismatch between relative string heights (unless you have a 2" high action). You could of course profile the frets for a 14" radius if you have a suitable radius block, but then you need a fret profiling file and the ability to dress and polish frets. Frankie can do it I'm sure, but the work (and cost) keeps piling up.

Allparts, in theory, do an offset 8mm to 4mm post adapter that's eccentric, so you can adjust the post distancing and position slightly. I've been looking at these for use myself with my very wonky GSM-1 bridge, but they are out of stock and they may not do them any more, despite still being listed. You'd need to use these with a bridge with 4mm post holes, and preferably a Nashville style bridge with the wider saddle travel, as the offset in post position will move the bridge forward or backwards slightly .

A couple of bits of 12mm dowel and an 11.5mm drill are certainly the cheapest option, but there's the re-finish around that area to consider.

[Simon Barden]

Looking at the Schaller website, you can get replacement M8 studs for the STM bridge so that it will fit directly on the kit as it was designed to work. I don't know whether you'd be able to get the studs easily anywhere else apart from direct from Schaller. The studs are €10.53 plus postage in nickel or chrome; other finishes are a bit more.

https://schaller.info/en/replacement...-studs-m8?c=40