Guitar restoration - Part 7 - Complications

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Neck set at proper angle
So, there are some changes in the plans (e.g. installing frets to the fretboard will happen before finishing - if I'll finish the fretboard at all).
But there are ones, which complicate my life. A lot. As the bridge is done, neck angle can be checked. And it is off, so the lowest possible action will be very high, if I simply glue the neck in as it is now. 

Setting neck angle (aka neck reset)

So I took a long straight-edge, measured how much tilt-back the neck needs in order to be flat with the top of the bridge. And 2-3mm of the neck heel must be taken off to have it straight up to the bridge.
Straight up to the bridge
Marked a straight line from the intersection of the neck heel and the fretboard to the lower part of the heel, 2-3 mm into the wood. With a chisel shaved off some material, and progressed slowly, checking the fit after each 5-10 chisel strokes, until I got to the desired neck angle and neck fit.

Shimming the neck joint

With the neck angle being set, I continued by shimming the neck to have a snug fit, to hold the neck in place even without glue and the screw tightened. It needed 1-2mm shims on two sides of the joint, glued the shims with white glue and mounted the neck with the screw
Gluing the shims to the joint
tightened this time, to find the location of the bridge.

Finding the location of the bridge

The bridge location can be found by measuring the distance between the nut and the center of the 12th fret, and doubling that distance. That is where the saddle should be. For more precise measurements, you can use the StewMac fret calculator, where you enter the scale length (as measured above), the number of frets, and you get the distance to each fret (both nut-to-fret and fret-to-fret), and you also get the distance from nut to saddle on the High E and the Low E strings. That is helpful. But trying it out and making sure everything is correct is even more fun. And a StewMac video for finding the bridge location had a nice idea on how to do that. Out of some scrap wood material and a string-through ferrule I made a simple jig (saw that in a Stew-Mac video) which can be clamped to the bridge block, and can hold the strings, while I am moving the bridge around to find its location.
Bridge location tester
This was the first time I could hear how the guitar really sounds, with two strings, the bass and the treble E. And it is ok. Found the location of the bridge so that the 12 the fret harmonic is the same note as the open string plucked, and marked the outline with a pencil. This, along with the outline of the fretboard end will be masked while I will be finishing the top, so these two areas remain unfinished to serve as good gluing surfaces.

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