About a year and a half ago a customer of mine (who I had already made a 7-to-wide6-string conversion for) came back and asked if I could make an even wider necked guitar for him. I said “Yes… ” wondering what I was letting myself in for. I was fairly new to making my own necks from scratch; but this 25 fret, 60mm e-to-e at the nut neck was definitely going to be custom-made so I had no choice 🙂
I went quite a way to finding out what spacing my customer needed. The previous 48mm e-to-e spacing wasn’t enough, so I build a dummy section of neck (using a brand new bass neck, pulling the frets and re-fretting it like the first 3 frets of a very wide 6 string guitar!) and created pairs of nuts & saddles so that he could try out spacings of strings in 2mm increments. I fitted headless tuners and a locking brass block at the other end. (You can see the progress of this amazing build here: Ultra-ultra wide 6 string custom.
My customer settled on 60mm e-to-e at the nut. To double check I mocked up the actual guitar dimensions that this would result in and made a double-thickness template and sent it to him in a cardboard box 😀 He responded that this was perfect for him. So I carried on.
I had ordered two EMG 9 string active pickups; one was available and I placed an order with EMG for the other. A year later they STILL hadn’t built it so I went to plan C (plan B had been to use two regular humbuckers together in a ‘Z’) which was to use an 8-string EMG which I discovered just about covered the string spread near the 25th fret. And just the other day I finished it. What a monster – and amazingly, I enjoyed the challenge of playing it.