On Christmas day, I gifted an all wood cigar box to my father-in-law who repairs violins and has built one of his own from scratch. He posed a question concerning neck length. He is going to do a bolt/glue-on style neck and he plans on carving the neck out of a 3"x3" solid maple piece. He wants to a build a "12-fret" style CBG. Including the head stock, what would be a good length for the neck?
Thanks!
Chris
Replies
Maple is a fantastic choice for making necks. Most of your 6 string electric guitars have maple necks. Guild used to make a electric/acoustic guitar that was all maple and it sounded glorious. Saw it in a guitar shop, natural curly maple finish. Went back the next day to get it, but some other lucky dog got it before I could.
As I have mentioned in other posts, the bridge position plays an important role in sound production, it must be able to make the top vibrate to produce a sound with any volume or quality. A bridge sitting on the back edge of the box is not the ideal position. With a pickup it's a different story.
Taff
You are correct Taffy. I have found that about 1/3 of the way in from the tail end of the box works best. If you look at guitars made in the last 200 years they mostly follow this formula. By the way I admire your guitars.
With a 25" or so scale the body needs to meet the neck at about the 18th fret. This will put the bridge in the proper position. A 12th fret system won't work very well on a cigar box because it is so small.
I try to put my bridges between 1/4 and 1/3 of the length of the box. He has decided to move the bridge to be about 4" from the end of the box and adding the difference to the neck. He is going to carve the neck out of a special kind of maple that is normally used for violin necks. It is aged and harder than what you would get at the box stores. He does really good scroll work and plans on carving something into the headstock for this cbg build.
Thanks gents! He is just in the planning stages of his first CBG. I drew out a plan for him so he could see what he needs to look at for his design.
The 12-fret design puts the 12th even with the edge of the box. The first issue was the box. The box is only 12" long. So we had to go with a scale shorter than 25".
12fretCBG.JPG
After seeing your pic and hearing your design intentions, I'd personally leave an additional 1" between the last fret and the 12th fret, (just leave this part of the fretboard uncut)allow yourself extra room for the strings to mount easily and have a decent break angle without them going to the end of the box, only exception would be if your neck is going through and out the end of the box a couple inches and the strings mounting there.
example;
But planning ahead is a good thing!
Yep, what Richard said.
on my acoustic guitars l often use a 25" scale, some may have 12 frets to the body, and some 14 frets to the body. Same scale legnth different fret spacing, but both have 21 frets in all. If I used only 12 frets, there would be a lot of unfretted fingerboard on the 25" scale.
If he is looking for a shorter neck instrument he could consider mandolin, uke or banjo.
cheers Taff
Personally, I only use maple for fretboards, but, it's considered the hardest of the softwoods or softest of the hardwoods, I imagine it would be ok for a neck, and combine that with a different material for the fretboard, should be plenty strong for a 3 string. To kinda answer your question, roughly 36" is needed for most necks so you can cut either a scarf joint headstock or carved one. Basic neck length is determined by what scale length and material used for the body, just know that the scale is measured from the nut to the saddle, so figure on a length from the nut to either the middle of your box or very back end at most, depending on guitar style(look at other builds) so say you want a 24" scale git, add the headstock, maybe another 6", plus the remaining distance from the saddle to end of box and any additional amount if you want a through neck to extend beyond the box as a tailpiece if desired. Some people say they cut a 36" piece, I usually cut a 42" piece, allows for error and design changes along the way.
Oh, and to add, the amount of frets makes not much difference, you'll use a fret calculator to properly space your frets whether you want 12 or 21 plus frets. Depending on the size of the box and the scale length, if you only want a total of 12 frets to be exposed beyond the end of the box, it will place your bridge/saddle close to the bottom of your box unless it's a long box. Remember, overall length has to be long enough to acquire the scale length from nut to saddle placement.