Sorry for the lack of updates, I ran out of steam and there was stuff round the house to do (put up shelves, fit an extra front door lock because our neighbours keep dubious company, blinds to put up).
Anyway, I've got my second wind, so here we go
I got to work on attaching the neck to the body. Having never made a neck pocket in my life before (this neck is so different from the old one it's like making a new one) I was nervous about this. I was reading this very useful article which gave me the impetus to get off my backside:
http://buildyourguitar.com/resources/pocket/index.htmHowever, I'm not quite ready to go straight to the body, so instead I made a template out of MDF marked with a centre line so I can place it on the (similarly marked) body. Using the same trick of clamping two lengths of wood to the sides of the neck then removing the neck I got this (with a router with a roller at the top of the cutter):
Applying this to a spare bit of MDF yielded this:
Which unfortunately was "70s Fender" tight
No worries though, I have a trick for this eventuality. I will apply an appropriate number of layers of electrical tape to the guide roller, pulling the cutter away from the template edge and making the hole a little smaller.
In other news I have decided to get some high end headless hardware to do a right good job of this project. I have gone with ABM stuff.
Eventually, I hope it's going to end up something like this:
Except that the pickguard will be black.
