Chinese Electric Kit - Finding Center / Fitting the neck
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2018 8:08 pm
Hey All!
So I bought an electric p-bass kit off of ebay and dove in. Wanted to walk you all through some of my experience so far and see if anyone had any tips/comments/suggestions in case I'm going down the wrong path on a few things...
First thing I noticed was the neck and body fit was semi-sloppy... so needless to say I was a little weary about attaching the neck to the body purely based on the pocket fit. So.. I attempted to find the center of the body/neck to hopefully help line things up accurately so I could feel better about where I was going to fasten the neck to the body.. yikes! With the smallness of a p-bass pickup route there wasn't much to go off of.. I drew all sorts of lines on the body to hopefully come close to a center line I could match up with the neck.. but I wasn't satisfied that I had found it. I resorted to see if I could use the neck, a few strings and the bridge to get a better idea of where everything went. So I put the E and G string tuners in the head stock, clamped the bridge to the body where I thought it might go (based on my other attempts to find center) and strung the E and G strings through the bridge and tuners.. Then I eye-balled the string spacing on either side of the neck to see how close I had come to center (I attached a picture). I figured if the spacing from each string to the side of the neck looked fairly even all the way down I must be pretty darn close to a good neck-to-body fit, bridge placement and overall center.
My biggest concern is that the neck pocket has some visible space in it. I've attached a picture of it. It's not horrible, but big enough to look a little ugly and to cause my concern.
Lemme know what you think!
-Scott
So I bought an electric p-bass kit off of ebay and dove in. Wanted to walk you all through some of my experience so far and see if anyone had any tips/comments/suggestions in case I'm going down the wrong path on a few things...
First thing I noticed was the neck and body fit was semi-sloppy... so needless to say I was a little weary about attaching the neck to the body purely based on the pocket fit. So.. I attempted to find the center of the body/neck to hopefully help line things up accurately so I could feel better about where I was going to fasten the neck to the body.. yikes! With the smallness of a p-bass pickup route there wasn't much to go off of.. I drew all sorts of lines on the body to hopefully come close to a center line I could match up with the neck.. but I wasn't satisfied that I had found it. I resorted to see if I could use the neck, a few strings and the bridge to get a better idea of where everything went. So I put the E and G string tuners in the head stock, clamped the bridge to the body where I thought it might go (based on my other attempts to find center) and strung the E and G strings through the bridge and tuners.. Then I eye-balled the string spacing on either side of the neck to see how close I had come to center (I attached a picture). I figured if the spacing from each string to the side of the neck looked fairly even all the way down I must be pretty darn close to a good neck-to-body fit, bridge placement and overall center.
My biggest concern is that the neck pocket has some visible space in it. I've attached a picture of it. It's not horrible, but big enough to look a little ugly and to cause my concern.
Lemme know what you think!
-Scott