Manfred Klose wrote
your neck pocket will also need to be angled back slightly
i noticed that , and i'm trying to figure out how i am going to saw an angle out in the neck pocket?
It's not so difficult if you have a router (and why would you even want to build guitars without router?). You make a wedge with the angle you calculated, as big as your router base and neck pocket put together. You make a cutout in it on the lower side, that is slightly bigger than the neck pocket. You stick the wedge like a collar around the neck pocket with double tape, and voila: you can now rout at the right angle. The 'copy down' bit will follow your previously cut pocket shape.
Making the wedge is also not so hard, providing you have a good hand planer and use layered (what do you call it here? Multiplex? Laminate?) wood. Being glued together from layers of even thickness, this wood will show the thickness change as glue lines, like an altitude line on a map. The planer will enable you to straighten the lines, making the angle of the wedge uniform. Remeber that you do not need the low side of the wedge to be of zero thickness, so leave yourself a couple of mm thickness to keep your wedge strong.
Manfred Klose wrote
What is a "TOM"?
This is cool for Tune-O-Matic, the Les Paul type bridge.
