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  #1  
Old 06-16-2010, 04:20 AM
snowmandeflator snowmandeflator is offline
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Default How to make a very short guitar neck??

Hi.

I am currently in the process of designing and building a travel guitar and was wondering if there is a way to minimise the neck length? Personally, i would only really need up to the 12th fret of a guitar if i was usign it during travel so is there a way to reduce the fretboard to this length to minimise the overall guitar length?

I also plan to use a minimal sized body and make the guitar 'headless', placing the machine heads somewhere on the body to add to the minimal length.

Also any good websites with info on neck lengths and fret spacing etc would be very helpful.

Basically, please tell me everything you know about guitar necks!

Barny
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Old 06-17-2010, 04:53 AM
cwguitars cwguitars is offline
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I'm assuming you're designing an electric guitar. Acoustic guitars require a vibrating surface which would require additional body length.
The only thing that will decrease overall guitar length is scale length (which would decrease the space in between frets). Having a shorter neck (frets to body) will not decrease the overall length because a longer body will be required to accomodate for the scale length.
However, if you decrease scale length, it can get to a point where it is hard to physically play.

A Steinberger is essentially as short of a guitar as you can get. As you can see, the guitar is just slightly longer than the scale length. The only way it can be shorter is to make the scale length shorter. You can change the number of frets to the body (making the neck longer or shorter), but the strings must be long enough to accomodate the scale length.

http://www.steinberger.com/SS2F.html
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Last edited by cwguitars; 06-17-2010 at 05:22 AM.
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Old 06-20-2010, 04:16 AM
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patticake patticake is offline
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hopefully the stew mac fret calculator will help
http://www.stewmac.com/FretCalculator

btw, the yamaha jr1 has a 21 3.4" scale, and both the tacoma papoose and breedlove travel guitar have a 19" scale, although the 19 inchers are recommended for tuning to A rather than E.
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