Mod Garage Guitar Makeover: Neck-Pocket Cleanup and DIY Routing

Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage! Let’s pick up where we left off with our Telecaster.Our next step will be to take care of the neck pocket, which is a very important and crucial task. This is the contact point of the body and the neck, so we want a tight, precise connection for maximum tuning stability and playing comfort.I don’t know if it’s the same on all Harley Benton T-styles, but the fitting accuracy of the Harley Benton’s neck and neck pocket is perfect—I wish I saw this kind of quality on guitars which cost more than 10 times the price of this one! No need to modify our neck pocket by gluing in some wooden veneer to make it tighter; we can leave it just the way it is.While the fitting is commendable, unfortunately the craftsmanship of the neck pocket itself is not that good. Besides wooden debris and chips, there’s a lot of “stuff” inside that I can’t identify for certain, but it’s likely some grain filler and clear coat. We’ll need to remove a fair amount from the neck pocket to ensure the heel of the neck has a completely level surface for installation.I decided to use a simple razor blade, a Japanese carving knife, and a razor knife to scrape all the junk away. You can also use some micro chisels, or even simply sanding paper. Special knives that are used for guitar lutherie as well as violin-making are ultra-sharp, and with some practice, it’s easy and fast to use them for such tasks. I was surprised by how much material there was in the neck pocket; it had a strong chemical smell to it, so it went immediately into the garbage.Next, I took some sandpaper of different grits to make the surface as smooth as possible. I started with 150-grit and worked my way up to 1000-grit. After blowing away all dust, the neck pocket was absolutely even and clean, offering the perfect surface for the neck heel. Pleased with the result, I moved on to the next task.For some reason, there was a big hole in the neck pocket, which I think has something to do with the CNC routing or the painting process. While this hole is not a problem regarding stability, and it’s invisible after the neck is installed, it’s not in the original Fender design, and my inner monk can’t live with this, so it had to be closed with a wooden dowel. After measuring, it turned out to be a metric 10 mm hole, and I knew luck was on my side—as is often the case, IKEA would be my best friend. You’re probably familiar with the bevelled wooden dowels used on almost every IKEA product to attach two parts together. They’re made out of strong beech wood and available as individual spare parts with an 8 or 10 mm diameter, so I always have a good collection in the shop. This was easy going: I simply cut the dowel to length and put it in a cup of warm water for a couple minutes so it expanded a little bit for a tight fit. After drying it for a short time, I put some wood glue on it, plus some in the hole, before pushing it in and wiping away the excess glue with a damp cloth.A tip from the shop: Ask your local optical store what they are doing with the old lenses from their customers. If there’s a chance you can get some for free, this is the perfect helper for any glue job—I always have a good collection of such lenses in the shop, and they’re easy to clean with a bit of rubbing alcohol. Put the wood glue on the concave side of the lens and use a toothpick to apply the glue to the dowel and hole. Afterwards, wipe the rest of the glue away, clean the lens with water, and it’s ready for the next time. This also works for super glue, but you’ll have to throw away the lens afterwards.Here, we can clearly see how many different pieces of wood are glued together for the body (I count four pieces alone in the small neck pocket), that the body is laminated horizontally, and the thickness of the paint.As you can see, the routings for the bridge pickup and the electronics are a little bit strange. The bridge pickup’s cavity is relatively shallow, and a Forstner drill bit was used to create deeper spots for the three screws holding the pickup in place. At the bottom of the electronics compartment is a block of wood, which I’d guess was there to shorten routing time and reduce production costs. I still haven’t decided on the pickups and electronics I’ll use for this guitar, but I certainly don’t want to run into any trouble making them fit. The wooden obstruction here could limit what sorts of pots and pickup-selected switches we can use, so it’s best to get ahead of that and remove it from the equation. (Even if it doesn’t end up being 100 percent necessary, it’ll remove a bit of excess weight!) So, let’s carve out some space here.The professional way would be to mask the whole body with tape and use a handheld router to remove the wood. Since I bet most of you don’t have that sort of tool, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way, using a Forstner drill bit and a drill press. I don’t recommend any handheld drilling device for this—if you don’t have access to a drill press or a handheld router, ask your local carpenter if he can do the work for you. After masking the body, the drilling process is easy to do with a sharp Forstner bit. I used a smaller one for the edges and a bigger one for the rest.It’s a crude but effective—and fast—way to remove the wood. After the drilling, I used some sandpaper to smooth out the surface and put some shellac on the bare wood, but this isn’t mandatory—my inner monk, you know? Take care to not drill too deep, which happened to me years ago on a custom-made Jaguar body with a very special paintjob. That wasn’t fun to explain to the customer.Next month, we’ll finish the work on the body, before moving on to the hardware and electronics. The good news is that our $340 budget is still in hand for future investments, so stay tuned.