There are two lessons in this guitar I’ve just finished: firstly, don’t rout in a hurry and secondly, stick to the sequence you know works!
I learned a while back that when making guitars with snug-fitting bolt-on necks (as opposed to the looser and more adjustable Strat-style fitting) you have to fit the neck and the bridge before routing any pickup cavities. If you have CNC or can work with very accurate templates then it’s tempting to mark up a centre-line with neck pocket, pickup cavities and any bridge cavities all located off that centre-line. But in my experience by the time you’ve routed and finessed the neck pocket and fitted the neck the neck centre-line can wander slightly off the nominal centre-line. And remember, 1mm difference by the end of the neck pocket can turn into 2 or more mm by the time you reach the bridge position. So if you mark and rout everything at the same time you may find the centre-line moves slightly but you’ve already committed to the pickup cavity positions.
This is what happened on this last build, ‘Trekki 6’. Even though I knew the importance of fitting the neck fully before fitting the bridge and then locating, marking and routing the pickup cavities, I didn’t do it that way. Why? Because I was in a hurry as I had to get all my routing jobs done in one session. At this time I was saving up all my routing jobs for trips to my friend’s workshop (to avoid upsetting neighbours with noise pollution) hence the self-imposed rush.
I only really noticed this imbalance when I came to finish this guitar the other day. It became clear that the pickup that I had for the bridge would look very mis-aligned particularly because it had regular pole screws. As it happens, it would have been a poor choice anyway – thanks to Seymour Duncan’s bizarre choice to make a majority of its ‘bridge’ humbuckers 48mm E-to-E pole spacing which guarantees the outer strings don’t sit over the poles – but even worse with this cavity misalignment. I decided that a temporary solution would be to use a pole-less humbucker that I had in the spares box. As you can see it just about works visually and it sounds fine but it’s obvious that by the time we get to the bridge pickup cavity it’s substantially off to one side.
Thankfully this guitar wasn’t made for a customer, so I can afford to hang it up as a ‘keeper’ – and one that I can modify at my own pace. But it is a timely reminder – just at the point where I’m about to start work on my 2nd eBook ‘6 steps to guitar-making heaven’ – of the value of following the correct sequence. Thankfully, also, the recent move to a new workshop means that I can rout at any time I need to, day and night, so that no longer will I put myself under pressure to complete x number of routing jobs in a single session.
