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A customer brought in two guitars for resets. One is a Silvertone with a standard dovetail that I've already reset and is clamped. In the meantime I've attacked the second guitar: a old parlour. It was an absolute pig to remove the neck as it was full of glue because the joint was badly cut and there were gaps all over the place.

I've tided up the joint and have good mating surfaces now. Wondering about best practice in regards to a) clamping, and b) whether it's best to reinforce the joint with dowel/bolt?

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Every Levin until the 1970s had this not so good neck to body connection. My standard is to make a hole through the neck block about 1/3 from the tip of the heel and drill a hole into the neck foot for a wood screw from the inside. I strengthen the wood around the hole in the neck foot with thin superglue. I use a small washer for the screw to spread the load from the head of the screw. The hole in the neck block is a bit wider the the outer diameter of the screw, the hole in the neck foot a bit wider than the smallest diameter of the screw between the threads.

I drill the hole in the neck block first, then use a nail or screw through the hole to mark the place to drill into the neck foot with the neck in place. I use some paste wax for the screw and shape the the hole with the screw before the neck reset.

If the heel is an "ice cone heel" or very thin and fragile, I drill a 8 mm hole for a hardwood dovel through the whole neck foot from the cap to the fretboard and glue it with epoxy. To strengthen the heel and to make the mounting of the screw more secure. The cap will hide the dovel.

If the neck heel has a cap I recommend to loosen it. I don' know how many times I've been fooled by the cap when making angle adjustments of the neck when doing the reset!

Excellent, Roger. Thanks! Pretty much how I was thinking to do it, but great to have the extra detail. Not sure I totally follow what you mean by the heel cap throwing you off? I took it off anyway to get steam in that end.

It is sooo easy to shave off the neck and shave off the neck measuring once and twice to increase the angle to the bridge only to find that the heelcap is the only part that actually is resting against the guitar! Needless to say, this is not the way to do the neck reset. A triangular shim in the bottom of the neck pocket is usually the only remedy to get it right again... Now, getting the heelcap off for this style of neck is the first thing I do :-)

One more thing. One major drawback with this neck connection is that all the force from the strings are acting on the soft wood in the neck block. On a real dovetail the neck rests on the stiff and hard sides of the guitar. I know that, but on my latest Levin neck reset I was in a hurry and didn't roout the neck pocket deeper and topped the bottom of the neck pocket with a hardwood shim (about 3 mm thick maple) as I know I should. Well. After a couple of days with string tension the neck rotated into the soft spruce in the neck block and now I have to do another neck reset... The saddle needs to be about 2 mm lower now and that is no good. Bummer!

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