Official Luthiers Forum!

There's that really soft flat board material you can get at hobby shops, wondering if that would suffice or if it would take away sustain? I think I would prefer wood but not sure how to go about making something so perfectly thin.

Maple is what the neck is made of and makes a great shim.

You can duct tape a thin piece of what ever to a spare board and use a belt sander to sand it very thin. Carefully removing the duct tape and using naphtha to remove adhesive residue since the sander heats up the tape works fine too.

Or just get some veneer, mahogany, maple, etc and double it or more if necessary.

Makes sense, thanks. I don't have a belt sander but I may know someone who does. I have glass with sandpaper on it but that might take a while and be inaccurate.
I should probably go with veneer.

A piece of veneer works great if you just want to shim the overstand - ie make the neck sit higher in the pocket but not change the angle. Lots of times we want to change the angle slightly and I have a hard time making little wedge shaped shims on my belt sander. Last time I was ordering some stuff from StewMac I had them throw in a few of these

http://www.stewmac.com/Materials_and_Su ... uitar.html

ps - its pretty amazing what you find in Fender neck pockets - most common are picks, a piece of cardboard (match book covers), business cards. I once found a piece of a credit card.

pps - the StewMac shim is a take off on the idea that Taylor uses - little cnc'd shims with the designation etched onto them. It is my understanding that a Taylor tech can take a couple of measurements and feed them into an app that will tell him which shims to use. In theory you could do that with a Fender also - its simple high school geometry - but I just put one in and see if it gets better. Here I was putting a tremolo in a Jagstang and needed to change the neck angle slightly

All excellent suggestions above.

In addition... Depending on how much shim you need....
Soda can and aluminum roof flashing both make good shim stock.
These tend to be very consistent dimensionally.

Most aluminum roof flashing is around 0.015" thick
Notebook and printer paper also make good shim stock if you need 0.003" or so.

So the material doesn't matter?

Sure, real 50's soda cans or vintage toneroof flashing sound much better...

The real answer, probably not enough to hear it

_________________
Rian Gitar og Mandolin

Why I ask is because this guitar came with a 1/4" wide piece of cardboard shim in the rear of the pocket to change the neck angle.
It sounded much better when I removed it. I don't think I need to change the angle but the action is still pretty high considering the saddles are bottomed out.
Of course the poor sound might have been from the air pocket that's created when the neck gets angled but I was never sure if that was true or not.
Could be both I guess.

People make a big fuss over whether a glued set neck "sounds" better than a screwed neck and I'm of the opinion that everything on a guitar contributes to its sound (good and bad), but how significant this is is pretty hard to tell. However, it makes sense to me to try to optimize every little thing - if the theory says a soft material like cardboard or you first example has an affect, then why use it? I've built both set neck and screwed neck guitars, they all seem to sound pretty good, but I do try to make the neck joint as good as I can - tight fitting, no air gaps, and it just seems right to use a nice maple shim against a maple neck. There was that period where Fenders had the adjustable necks - they seem to have gone out of fashion - maybe because of fears of not sounding as good.

I'm also kind of anal about setting the neck angle so that you get the best travel of your saddles. For me the situation you describe is unacceptable - before I start doing any "setup" work I want the neck angle so I have lots of travel in both direction based on the action I know I want. I've spent way too much time setting the necks on acoustics to not want to do it right on an electric.