Believe it or not, there’s nothing I love more than a challenge.  And every guitar I build presents one.  This guitar’s biggest challenge was the light-up fret markers.  Lucky for my customers I don’t scare easily.  I had seen a handful of instruments in the past sporting light-up face dots, though it had been a few years and I’d never had the opportunity to dismantle one.  Still I approached the task of lighting up this neck with what knowledge and experience that I had, and the results were at least as good as I expected.

    I decided that I would use pearl dots, instead of plastic, and place the lights behind so that the neck was pretty enough when not lit.  After some tests I began assembling the fretboard so that there was little disruption to the neck’s structure.  I also found a way to illuminate the side dots as well without installing more LEDs.  Through the use of good-ol’ fiber optics.

    To make the most of the illumination I had, I used reflective tape around the edges of the LED cavity.  This provided a bit of reflection that, though subtle, did if fact improve the look of the dots when lit.  It helped to even out the beam as well as brighten it.

    Once the lights and wiring were in place I sealed the electronics in epoxy to ensure that there would never be any connection issues as well as to provide a solid gluing surface for the neck.  I then placed small polished metal strips over the lights themselves to keep the small open cavities free of glue as well as for added reflectivity.  At this point I also attached the small driver circuit needed to limit the current to the LEDs.  Connecting them straight to a battery with no other resistance would read like a short and fry the lights.  I decided to keep them from being harmed in this way in the future, since this is a bolt-on instrument and it would be possible for someone to attempt to hotwire the neck while off of the body, it would not make sense to put the driver anywhere else. This way the only components of this circuit in the body are the batteries and on-off switch.

    After all that was finally over with the neck proceeded as usual.  I am typically of the opinion that you can never have too much strength in a neck and have always installed carbon fiber reinforcement bars along with a 2-way truss rod.  I’ve never been a fan of having to remove a neck to adjust it, so I’ve been using a lot of the spoke headed rods lately, since they don’t require you to remove anything, not even a cover, to make adjustments.  You can see in the pictures to the left the maple plug I install to the rod from being removed.

    Now as fun as it is to make things light up green, my primary concern has always been playability.  One of my favorite features that I build into my necks is a compound radius fretboard.  Your fingers curl when relaxed and so it is easy to understand the comfort of an old Strat neck.  The rounder the board the more comfortable the feel, especially for bar chords.  Of course when you bend strings on a round fretboard the notes fret out if the action is low.  A compound radius flattens out as you get closer to the body.  This actually allows for lower action with bend clearance than a relatively flat fretboard.  This neck’s radius changes from 10” to 16”.  I know that Chris likes his action a bit higher than I do, but the guitar is built to perform well with action much lower than most.

    Of course the neck’s gotta feel good.  I carve all my necks by hand until they feel good.  The process is fairly simple - start with a chunk of wood and take away everything that doesn’t feel like a neck.