I acquired an SG body from a friend. He had sanded half the finish off and given up on the project. I sanded the rest of it down and got some practice spraying with a can of Krylon paint ("Pistashio"). Now I'm interested in making a neck for it. I have built a couple little guitars (a cigar box type and an electric ukulele), so I'll be upgrading my skills with this one: I'll be doing a truss rod and separate fingerboard, both for the first time. Making a neck pocket fit a neck was relatively straightforward. Making a neck fit a preexisting pocket proves to be quite the challenge. I have a few specific questions as I get started (with more surely to follow):
1) It's and SG body, but has a bolt-on neck; does anyone know what the original model likely was?
2) I have a maple board that is 1" thick. With my template I've roughly measured the total desires thickness at 1" with the bridge in it's lowest position. I was planning on getting a 1/4" piece of something from my local hardwood supplier to use for the fingerboard. Should I plan on planning down the maple to 3/4" or so, or is there enough adjustment range in the TOM style bridge to make up the difference? (I've never used such a bridge before.)
3) Scale length. On my scratch builds I've always attached the neck and then fine tuned the bridge location to match. Is there a trick to getting the nut location at precisely the right spot? Thinking it through just now, I suppose I could do the maple part of the neck first and wait to see where the nut ends up and do my scale length from that distance. Hmm...
4) Speaking of scale length, I noticed on my last build that do (I presume) to the raised nature of the bridge, the actual horizontal length from nut to bridge was almost several mileters off of the intended value when properly intonated. (I do my scale lengths in mm for ease of subdividing on the ruler when marking them out.) Is there a common fudge factor used to compensate for this?
5) I usually post from my iPhone and I've noticed that pictures almost never orient themselves properly. Sometimes they're upside down--in this case, rotated 90 degrees. Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks for your help!
Matt