fitting a dovetail neck

[hat]

Just curious - when fitting a dovetail neck, do you remove material from the neck, socket, or both?

[Bruce Sexauer]

The dovetail cavity is the given. Material is removed from the dovetail itself and from the cheeks of heel.

[charles Tauber]

New construction or repair?

In general, it is easier to remove material from a "positive" shape than a "negative" shape. For example, it is physically easier to remove material from a tenon rather than its mating mortise. Similarly, it is often easier to remove material from the positive "tail" than the negative socket.

But, it depends upon the specific circumstances. If, for example, you have a "bump" protruding on the interior of your mortise, the best fit occurs when you remove the bump. Some of it depends upon assessing the geometry you have and taking the appropriate steps to have the two mate. Sometimes that is the positive shape, sometimes the negative.

[mirwa]

I teach people to remember two things when it comes to setting necks, changing the neck angle and locking the neck in place are two seperate processes.

1 - A neck reset is simply changing the heel angle as it contacts the body, so if you are doing a neck reset we remove material from the heel.

2 - The neck is locked in place by either glue or bolts, if its glue, then doing a neck reset makes the base of the heel more loose in the joint, so you do not need to remove material but in fact add material, so we typically add thin pieces of wood to the reciever to make it lock tighter.

Steve