Advice: Alignment During Neck-Through Assembly

[Jared McMahon]

I'm slowly approaching the point in my neck-through electric bass construction where I'll be cutting the wings and attaching them to the neck. I'm reviewing different people's projects, how they've done these steps, in what order, etc. My question to y'all is, assuming you've done neck-through builds, how have you ensured reasonably true alignment between the wings and the body during assembly? I can think of:

- short dowels joining the components
- cauls on the top, bottom and butt end
- rough-shape the pieces, glue-up with decent alignment, do all real smoothing and final shaping after

Thoughts? Experiences?

[John Coloccia]

Using dowels only pushes the problem around: "How do I ensure dowel alignment?". There are jigs you can use, but personally I think it's over kill.

Generally, I like glueing up oversize and trimming to fit. Building guitars is hard enough without worrying about perfect glue ups. I like gluing up "blanks" and then shaping afterwards. That's just me, though...I'm a hack

[john brenton]

I'm a hack

Haha, me too man. Everything I try and pre-fab turns into a sticky, angry mess. Anything I can glue on and trim to size is the way to go.

[Rob Luter]

Tongue and groove is pretty tough to beat.