Haddo-caster 3.0 - Routing!

If routing and cutting into hundreds of dollars worth of guitar makes you queezy, then read no more. The next step involves some minor modifications to the body of the guitar, and the neck.

First, the neck. The neck pocket of this American Deluxe telectaster body has a neck angle adjustment called microtilt. There is a small hole in the neck plate that gives access to a hex screw that is mounted through the neck pocket with a simple t-nut. However, the 1952 re-issue neck that I am using does not have this feature, and screwing that hex bolt up would just damage the wood on the neck, and possibly crack it since maple is so hard.

I walked all over the hardware store yesterday looking for something that I could mount to the neck that would make contact with the microtilt screw. I found these simple electrical plugs that are about 3/4" in diameter. It is meant to screw into a hole in some kind of electrical panel, and was actually too tall. I ground down the underside of one of these plugs on my bench grinder and came up with a little thread that could grip a 3/4" hole. I like this picture, it shows several elements in my shop. Note the Seymour Duncan pickup logo in the back, the roll of copper foil on the left (for shielding), and the 1-lb Kester 66/44 solder. Man, thanks to RoHS, that stuff may be outlawed some day. Gotta stock up on it. Oh, and this is all sitting on one of those Stewart-McDonald guitar mats. That thing has come in handy.

You would think that cutting into a $400 neck with a forstner bit would be terrifying. Well, maybe I have the stomach for it, because it really didn't bother me. Note that I took this picture with one hand holding the camera, and the other holding the neck, with the drill press turned on. I am using a tee-shirt to "protect" the neck. The hole here is offset from the location of the microtilt hole. That is because I want a flat surface to make that connection, without fear of the groove on my metal plug. First, I drilled a 1" hole about 3/32" deep. Then, I drilled out a deeper hole with a 3/4" forstner bit. The next picture will show why I needed to drill two holes.


Here you can see the finished product. I now have a metal receiving surface for the microtilt bolt to screw up against. I was able to turn the screw 3/4 of a turn, so the threads locked into this rock hard maple. Dang, that stuff is tough! I was almost afraid of splitting it with just the little bit of pressure I was applying to get this plug's threads screwed in. I don't know how I got it to line up so perfectly. I decided not to back it out and apply carpenter's glue because it seemed sturdy enough, and I didn't think I would ever get it looking this good again! Note that I didn't really need a 1" hole to receive the minor "lip" of this plug. But, I did not have a 13/16th bit, and didn't feel like modifying (ruining) a spade bit to make this cut. If this was an exposed item, I would have ground the point off of an exactly sized spade bit, though. But, remember, this will always be hidden in the neck pocket.

Here you can see that we are almost on the two-year birthday of this neck. The date, stamped in two places, says "April 5, 2005." (The body is 2006, and a different model - that's why this is called a partscaster, but my parts are all Fender parts.) Also note the workman's name stamped here. "F. Perez" should be proud, this neck is beautiful. It is as close to one-piece quarter-sawn as an American neck can get. But wait, wouldn't the name indicate that this neck was made in the Mexican factory in Ensenada? Well, no. The American factory in Corona, California has many Mexican-American tradesmen working there.


The next modification was not as scary. I needed to remove some more wood from the control cavity of this guitar. This could have been done with a router, but I went ahead and used the 1" forstner bit shown here to deepen the cavity along the whole portion to the same depth. I need to deepen the back part of the cavity beause I will reverse the controls from the standard method and have the pickup selector switch in the back, and not the front. I want to do this modification because I sometimes accidentally hit the switch when playing on Stratocasters and Telecasters. It drives me nuts! On many guitars, the cavity is not deep enough along the whole distance, though, so you can't just swap things around without this mod.


Here's what the bit looks like down in the cavity. I just cut about 20 times to create the same effect as a router. I would say that the slot is about 1-1/16th" so the 1-inch bit fit very well in there. All I needed to do was to clean up the sides with a chisel and then that's it. Hey, note that I didn't bother to take the bridge and pickup off when I did this. If this was someone else's guitar, I would take more care of stuff like this. But, a little flying wood chips never hurt anyone.

The last body modification (I think) was to carve out this slice of heaven right here. The screw at the end of the neck is to adjust the truss rod. This is not something that really has to be done that often. But taking the neck off of the guitar to do it is too much, I think. To access this, all I would need to do is remove the pickguard. I should have shown the process of cutting that pickguard. It came with one hole routed for the neck pickup, and I needed to add the middle pickup hole. I did not see too many hints on this out there in the web, so I improvised. I drilled a small hole over the middle pickup, then I enlarged it with files until it was pickup sized. It almost looks professional, I can't believe it. However, it took an hour, which is probably why I did not take any pictures - it was such a pain!

The next time you see these cavities, it will be with copper foil in them, for shielding.

--gh