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24 Fret Fiasco

R

rekrdskratcher

Nov 28, 2020
14
9
#1
Experience and mistakes are the best teacher, right? Well...

I just impulse-bought a loaded Ibanez RDGR body-only for $60-some as a winter project without thinking much beyond "slap a new neck on it and go rattle the house" before realizing that those normally came with a 24 fret neck on a 34" scale. (Oops.) More precisely, it's 24 frets to the end of the neck/pocket, not an overhanging fretboard onto the body (let's ignore the heel contouring and 5-bolt pattern as uh, I was going to just work around that somehow.)

I'm assuming that it's not really feasible to just drop a standard 20/21 fret neck into the existing pocket because the scale won't be aligned correctly (essentially I'd have to move the bridge off the back of the body to maintain that, right?) without moving it away from the existing bridge placement - which means 1) there'd be a gap in the pocket (I guess I could shape an insert for that?) and 2) even on a non-drilled replacement neck, I may not be able to use the existing mounting screw pattern, which seems like a problem for stability.

Is there a reasonable way out of this? ("Reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, here, I know.) It doesn't look like Warmoth/Allparts/etc. make an aftermarket 24 fret neck that's not just a fretboard overhang (and I don't really care about the upper frets that much, but that still leaves a neck pocket gap), and I'm a little dubious about picking up one of the extremely cheap Chinese-made 24 fret necks on eBay (although as a temporary solution to test things out, maybe?) - do I just watch for a 24 fret neck on the used market somewhere? Do my first neck build (I did a Grabber build last year after lurking in A LOT of threads here on TB, but I still bought a neck from Warmoth)? Make a very weird and bad coffee table out of this orphan body?
 
#2
rekrdskratcher said:
Experience and mistakes are the best teacher, right? Well...

I just impulse-bought a loaded Ibanez RDGR body-only for $60-some as a winter project without thinking much beyond "slap a new neck on it and go rattle the house" before realizing that those normally came with a 24 fret neck on a 34" scale. (Oops.) More precisely, it's 24 frets to the end of the neck/pocket, not an overhanging fretboard onto the body (let's ignore the heel contouring and 5-bolt pattern as uh, I was going to just work around that somehow.)

I'm assuming that it's not really feasible to just drop a standard 20/21 fret neck into the existing pocket because the scale won't be aligned correctly (essentially I'd have to move the bridge off the back of the body to maintain that, right?) without moving it away from the existing bridge placement - which means 1) there'd be a gap in the pocket (I guess I could shape an insert for that?) and 2) even on a non-drilled replacement neck, I may not be able to use the existing mounting screw pattern, which seems like a problem for stability.

Is there a reasonable way out of this? ("Reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, here, I know.) It doesn't look like Warmoth/Allparts/etc. make an aftermarket 24 fret neck that's not just a fretboard overhang (and I don't really care about the upper frets that much, but that still leaves a neck pocket gap), and I'm a little dubious about picking up one of the extremely cheap Chinese-made 24 fret necks on eBay (although as a temporary solution to test things out, maybe?) - do I just watch for a 24 fret neck on the used market somewhere? Do my first neck build (I did a Grabber build last year after lurking in A LOT of threads here on TB, but I still bought a neck from Warmoth)? Make a very weird and bad coffee table out of this orphan body?
Click to expand...

I think you need to jump in and make your own custom neck.
 
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#3
Second that. Besides the fret count and scale length issues, a typical aftermarket fender neck is going to have the wrong heel shape to go in that body. Making one fit will be more effort than it's worth.
 
#7
Two options I can think of.
  1. Get an unlined fretless neck. Ignore the side dots.
  2. Build you a neck! I promise it’s not as hard as you might think. I shied away from it at first too. But it’s fairly simple, and actually quite enjoyable. I crank them out pretty quickly these days. I usually skip the inlays on the fretboard, as you (the player) can’t see them while playing anyway (and if you can, then stop hunching over like that!). That actually saves a bit of effort. Shaping the contour yourself means you can get it exactly how you want it!
 
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#8
bobdabilder said:
If you're buying a neck with 20 or 21 frets or 24 frets but neck is only as long as 20 or 21 frets: make a spacer for the neck pocket assuming it's long enough.
Click to expand...

I guess my concern here would be that there simply wouldn't be enough surface area on a replacement 20/21 neck to bite into with it being an offset 5 screw pattern (instead of a rectangular 4 screw setup.)
 
#12
From the listing (don't have it in hand yet):

dorh7fzsy3aefcozz8te.jpg


hoc0mqpg3y1khmenmdrx.jpg
 
#16
Slidlow said:
Drawings, drawings and drawings first, then practice on some less expensive lumber. Also you get to design your own headstock:hyper::hyper::hyper:!
Click to expand...

Actually this kind of brings up a question I've never seen a good answer for - is there a good/cheap/readily-available type of lumber for practicing this kind of thing on? I still have a bunch of 1x6 (nominal) S4S maple stock from a big box store left over from completely different project, but is it thick enough to carve a one-piece neck from since I'm guessing it's probably right at 3/4" thick? I just hate to be wasteful with that if there's something cheaper to learn on. (I know I can go the laminate route as well.)
 
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#17
That 1 x 6 maple would probably be very good for the real neck, not just practice. As long as it's fairly well dried out and doesn't show any bad internal stresses. Build the neck as a 3-piece laminate, with the rings in the V-style, like I do. Basically, you cut three strips from the flat-sawn board, with the grain lines going nice and straight down the length.

All three strips then get rotated 90 degrees. Then look at the pattern of the rings on the ends. The strip with the flattest ring segments goes in the center, becoming nearly quarter-sawn. The other two, with the rings going on a diagonal curve, get flipped and placed to form an upward symmetrical V. Like this:

IMG_2628B.jpg


This is the most stable, strong way to build a neck.
 
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#18
Bruce has it nailed (as always). I've built many necks from s4s 1 x 6 maple bought at big box stores. Cheap enough to throw out if you make a mistake, but great for the real thing, too.
 
#19
Bruce Johnson said:
That 1 x 6 maple would probably be very good for the real neck, not just practice. As long as it's fairly well dried out and doesn't show any bad internal stresses. Build the neck as a 3-piece laminate, with the rings in the V-style, like I do. Basically, you cut three strips from the flat-sawn board, with the grain lines going nice and straight down the length.

All three strips then get rotated 90 degrees. Then look at the pattern of the rings on the ends. The strip with the flattest ring segments goes in the center, becoming nearly quarter-sawn. The other two, with the rings going on a diagonal curve, get flipped and placed to form an upward symmetrical V. Like this:

View attachment 4078425

This is the most stable, strong way to build a neck.
Click to expand...

Nice! Getting to build a neck AND accidentally clean the storage space up a bit? Sounds like a win!
 
#20
So let's talk neck heels.

When I did my Grabber build with a Warmoth neck, the process for matching those two up was extremely straightforward - route out and shape the neck pocket to the actual shape of the neck, drop it in, bingo-bango. (Narrator's note: in fact, it was not quite so bingo-bango due to SOMEONE'S impatience, but that's a story for another time and it all worked out in the end.) Since this is a contoured heel/pocket, AND it's squared off, it seems that I'm not going to just find a printable or machined template out there, and trying to measure the dimensions isn't quite straightforward because not only do the sides of the pocket converge in line with the (hypothetical) neck, but the sides of the pocket are very different lengths, so it's hard to square anything up to get the tapering correct.

BUT! A graphite rubbing of the very top of the pocket (with paper laid across the body) might get me the shape, right? Here's what I was able to pull out by doing that:



Am I on the right track with this approach? What do I need to watch out for with this method? Is it worth printing out gridded paper to do this rubbing for measurement purposes?
 

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