Stupid Luthier Trick #1
Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2023 7:58 pm
Stupid because if I had any brains I would have thought of this long ago.
If you're fitting a bolt-on neck and the angle isn't quite right, you've probably discovered that you have to bolt the neck, measure how off the alignment is, unbolt the neck, remove wood from the heel, bolt it back on again, re-measure, unbolt the neck, and so on.
All this bolting and unbolting got to be a drag, so I devised this quick-n-dirty way of bolting it on. It uses two eyebolts with the same thread as the neck hardware. No tools required, none of this business of getting the bolts aligned.
Each eyebolt has two nuts, which are positioned where the head of the neck bolt would be, and tightened against each other to lock in the position. At first, I included a flat washer to go between the nuts and the neck, but found that it wasn't necessary, since the head block was made of maple.
Of course, you can't get the eye-bolts as tight as you would with a proper wrench, but you can get pretty close, and I've found that, with this method, only a very slight additional fiddling has to be done after you've bolted the neck on properly. And you've saved yourself a lot of time.
If you're fitting a bolt-on neck and the angle isn't quite right, you've probably discovered that you have to bolt the neck, measure how off the alignment is, unbolt the neck, remove wood from the heel, bolt it back on again, re-measure, unbolt the neck, and so on.
All this bolting and unbolting got to be a drag, so I devised this quick-n-dirty way of bolting it on. It uses two eyebolts with the same thread as the neck hardware. No tools required, none of this business of getting the bolts aligned.
Each eyebolt has two nuts, which are positioned where the head of the neck bolt would be, and tightened against each other to lock in the position. At first, I included a flat washer to go between the nuts and the neck, but found that it wasn't necessary, since the head block was made of maple.
Of course, you can't get the eye-bolts as tight as you would with a proper wrench, but you can get pretty close, and I've found that, with this method, only a very slight additional fiddling has to be done after you've bolted the neck on properly. And you've saved yourself a lot of time.