Luthier Tip: Speed Up The Erlewine Neck Jig
Fair warning: There’s a slightly limited audience for this one but I know that there are a number of repairers and builders that pop by or get my mailings so this may be useful to them.
The Erlewine Neck Jig
If you work in—or have an interest in—the field of guitar repair, Dan Erlewine will need no introduction. Dan has been teaching players and repairers how to maintain and fix their instruments since the ‘80s (and working on them for twenty years before that).
Dan’s work in developing his neck jig has been massively useful to people like me. The Erlewine Neck Jig from Stew Mac lets a repairer simulate neck tension on a guitar neck. This makes for much more accurate fretwork, with less chance for weird necks to cause problems.
The neck jig is fantastic. I love it.
However, as soon as I began using it, one thing annoyed me.
The guitar body is held on a number of ‘levellers’—threaded posts with a swivel head. Depending on the guitar, four or more of these posts are placed in particular positions and at particular heights.
Swapping between different shaped guitars means moving the posts. That means unscrewing four, four-inch posts and re-screwing for height. That’s fine once, but after the fiftieth time, it gets old.
Levelling Post Mod
I grabbed a few pan-head philips bolts and cut off the heads (it’s important that the head be a smaller diameter than your threaded levelling post).
Then I just epoxied the bolt heads to the bottoms of the levelling posts.
Now I can use a screwdriver bit in my cordless drill to quickly unscrew and re-screw the posts.
Observe:
That’s it. Sorry that this hasn’t been for everybody but I reckon there are at least a few readers that will love this.
Dan’s New Jig
I have an older model of the neck jig. There’s a newer, snazzier one available at the moment that looks like it does away with the need to actually remove the levelling posts so they can be placed somewhere else. This will probably reduce the amount of screwing/re-screwing but they still need to be raised and lowered so I reckon this mod will help out even if you’ve got the newer model.
Incidentally, that newer jig looks even better than mine. I want one. Guitar repairers have to deal with Tool GAS as well. ;-)
This article written by Gerry Hayes and first published at hazeguitars.com
