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I bought this guitar for a relatively good deal about a year about.
It played great , had a good neck angle and sounded nice for a giant ply archtop
oh and it's beeeautiful!

Anyway it had an unsightly gap between the heel of the neck and the body. this was obviously scaring off most buyers so I got it a decent price.
It seemed really solid, wasn't moving and had good action and bridge height, I reconfigured it with a pair of surface mount hilotrons. (I kept all the original gear and the conversion was very minimal (two tiny screw holes to mount the bridge hilotron)
I also took measurements at the heel and kept an eye on the gap.
I've played it for the last year at home and many many rehearsals, a couple of recording sessions and recently a couple of shows. Solid the whole time. Nice playing and sounding guitar.
However it took a tumble in rehearsal recently..ooops! and I noticed the action had got .3 mmm higher at the 12th fret and the gap looked a little bigger. So i loosen off the strings and gave the neck a wiggle to see if it was moving, it did a little crackle and then easily wiggled in two directions. I did bit more gentle wiggling(of the guitar...) and then gave the heel a tap with a deadblow hammer (I used a cork sided ebony sanding block to protect the heel)
A couple of taps and it slid right out, to reveal cardboard shims on both mating surfaces.
No wood loss or finish problems. YAY
I have a receipt from work done in 2012 which included a 'neck reset'
I'm going to clean it up and start dry fitting it with hardwood shims, probably mahogany or maple.
My goal is to get a nice solid reset with a good angle and a tight fit of the heel to the body, unlike previously. Pictures (in reverse order..oops)
-As bought 1955 convertible
-heel gap close up
-converted to a 2 pickup guitar with custom made Brazillian rosewood synchro style bridge, pickguard, pickup surrounds and switch.
- in pieces
-close up of dovetail

Not too much interest in this post but I guess I wasn't posing any questions. This was my first neck reset and I was quite happy with the results.
Cardboard shims were removed and replaced with mahogany
Then they were slowly shaped to a tight fit by making the mortise with pencil, fitting , taking down high spots etc etc. the result was a very tight dry fit.
A previous reset 6 years ago(or the condition necessitating it) had left the finish chipped(but repaired around the reset so I didn't have to worry about the results. however I had some paint that was mixed up by the paint department at my work that I used to touch up the results. Here's a picture of the resulting join (prior to touch up and glue clean up0and the guitar. It's much tighter , has a better angle and is perfectly lined up on the body. Also the one main factor that had dropped it in value gas been rectified(large heel gap) and even better I have peace of mind regarding the integrity of the neck joint. It can go back to being one of my main gigging instruments

Nice work! Gig on!

Well done!

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