How to shim a guitar neck to adjust its angle

Hi neck angle .

It's a key ingredient to any good playing guitar .

If you have an angle that is under set , it can cause the guitar to have really high action , particularly in the upper registers .

So it's important that the neck angle of the instrument that you have matches the design .

Gibson's less .

For instance , if you look at it here , Gibson shoots for around a four degree angle , sometimes they end up closer to 3.5 .

This one happens to be about five degrees and that's kicked back to clear the design , the top carve and the type of hardware that they used on their guitars .

Whereas a fender you're gonna see lower profile hardware and electronics .

So the neck doesn't need the angle that you see on a Gibson guitar , but sometimes you will see a shim underneath there with a bolt on neck .

Occasionally they need a little help in order to get even playability all the way up and down the neck .

The use of neck shims isn't anything new at all .

Fender was doing it in the 19 fifties and sixties to accommodate for variations in neck pocket depth and in the seventies , they even came up with a little neck tilt adjustment and many other manufacturers kind of adopted that and have a similar method that they use to this day .

Here is an example of a sixties version of fender shim .

This came out of a music master that I have .

And then usually I see things like piece of cardboard or a couple of cut up guitar picks , um , stuffed underneath there , those work .

But what they end up doing is they leave a little bit of a gap between the bottom of the neck and the pocket .

You just kind of see that .

And in that gap , you don't get very good coupling of your parts .

You know , you want your neck and your body to be really tight together , you don't want any kind of gaps there .

Um because that affects the overall tone and sustain of the guitar .

Another thing that can happen with that gap is it can introduce moisture into that pocket , which can slightly swell up the tongue of the neck here and make the front line uneven .

So you really want a good nice fitting joint with no gap at all between the bottom of the neck and the pocket .

Dan Earlywine developed the idea of a full pocket neck shim with a measured angle that tapers down to nothing .

Here's an interesting example .

It is an Italian AOP guitar made by a company named Santa plays pretty nice until you get up to the 12th fr and it doesn't play at all .

So when I look at it , you can really see what's going on here .

The neck angle is too shallow for the pick up in the bridge that they have on this particular instrument , the pickup , which is adjustable , it doesn't have much of a , a range of adjustments .

So even at its lowest setting can't get it out of the way enough to get it playable .

And then even if I could , the bridge is at its lowest adjustment point , so I probably couldn't dial in the action that way .

But the cool thing is it's a bolt on neck .

So we'll be able to take the neck off this and change the angle without having to go through a big old ordeal .

In addition to the fender type shims , we sell for guitar and bass .

We also offer blank versions that can be trimmed , shaped and drilled to match any pocket and whole pattern .

Ok ?

I'm checking the neck angle with an angle gauge here and that's showing me that this one is currently set to about 3.5 degrees .

And we're gonna need considerably more than that in order to clear this neck , pick up these shims come in three different sizes .

We have a quarter degree , a half degree and one degree .

I can tell that the quarter degree is too thin to do us any kind of good in this situation .

The half degree I could probably get away with , but instead I'm going to go with the one degree just to be safe , that's going to give us the clearance over the pickup and allow us to have some little extra bridge height there as well .

Ok .

Lift the neck up out of the pocket here .

Oh , look at that .

There's a shim in there .

You see that , huh ?

But it didn't really do much .

It's real thin .

And if you look closely in the pocket , can you see the shape of the shim ?

It was actually just pressed into the woods .

So it didn't do any good at all .

They tried .

I had my one degree shim and the first step is to just do a basic mark out of the width of the neck pocket .

Make a little line .

I'm just gonna start cutting through .

I'm using a fresh blade .

You can also trim this with scissors if you want .

But I like using a knife .

Ok .

So that gives us the width that we need .

Now , we need to figure out the corner radius .

I'm gonna go in with a radius gauge .

17 64 is what this is showing up at .

So I've got that set here on the opposite side of the tool .

I'm just gonna draw those in .

You don't have to be perfect with these .

It doesn't have to be a 100% match , but you just want it to be pretty close So it takes up most of that pocket .

And what I like to do is go in with my sharp razor knife , just kind of cut off that little corner a little bit .

And then that way I can set up a couple of little pieces of sandpaper here and then just kind of round these guys over to the line if you have a belt sander that works real quick .

But this maple isn't very thick .

So it doesn't take long to get to the point where you want to get .

Now , we're gonna put this in the pocket .

All right , we got a good fit there .

The next step is to temporarily put the neck on so I can trace around the trim line for the rest of the template as well as mark the neck boat holes .

So I'm using what's called a transfer punch and , and so that puts the center on a hole that you're trying to drill through .

So you don't want to push too hard because you don't want to split that maple apart , making sure you're leaving just a little mark .

Ok .

So then now we have our drill through holes and I like to just touch them up a little bit with my pencil just so they're a little easier to see when I get them over to the drill press to drill .

And then I'm gonna trim these edges off right now .

We have a good fit .

Now it's time to drill our holes for the neck bolts to drill the holes .

I use the slowest speed that my drill press would run .

I use the brad point bit .

You'll notice I'm holding my fingers really close to the hole and this helps hold that thin wood down and keep it from shipping .

Ok , let's go .

Put this neck back on .

Ok .

Next on , shim's in place before I string it up .

I'm just gonna take a quick look at it with the straight edge to make sure that we're in the range that I'd like to see it in and it's looking great .

So we have probably close to an eighth of an inch clearance over the pickup , which is awesome .

And we have considerably more height over the saddle .

So instead of being adjusted almost all the way down , now , we're gonna be able to adjust it a little bit taller in its range and probably sound a little better to boots .

So that's what you want to see .

That's what the next Shim does and it's done its job great on this .

Can't wait to get strings on it and play it .

I'm no jazz player , but sounds pretty neat to me .

The shim made a huge difference .

It was super easy to install .

It was a really quick job too .

You guys saw pretty much the entire thing there .

I did it in less than 20 minutes , I'd say .

All right , this one's going home if you like this video and the topics we cover , hit that subscribe button and you'll receive more in your inbox .