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Posted by: shredmandan Jul 25 2007, 03:05 PM

Hello Everyone
I am wanting to buy a replacment neck for my very first electric guitar i got 10 years ago.Its a peavey tracer actually though i loved the guitar as it had a very thin neck perfect for shred and the humbucker sounds better than any duncan deigned i have heard.I want to buy one on Ebay but i need to figure out what i need to be looking for.I need to know what will fit and how to measure my guitar neck heel so i dont buy one that doesnt fit.If anyone can help me on this it would be appericated,also the neck i have now is a 22 fret but i can still put a 24fret on it as long as it fits right in body right???

thanks shredmandan

Posted by: shredmandan Jul 25 2007, 08:23 PM

Theres got to be one person on here that knows how to figure this out

Posted by: Smikey2006 Jul 25 2007, 08:55 PM

you can take off the neck and measure the fit with a ruler and then put the neck back on... as long as you do it carefully..its usually only 4 screws holding the neck in place.. depeding on the guitar.. im really not too sure.. ive never replaced the neck on a guitar where the neck is connected to the guitar.. if its like a fender than you can easily take off the neck measure it and put it back on.. others its not soo easy.. send a picture of around the neck area.

Posted by: tonymiro Jul 26 2007, 01:10 AM

Not sure m8 even once you measure your kneck how you would get the profile of another before you have it. Best advice I can think of is to find a good guitar tech who could fit a new neck regardless of the profile. I think for a strat type neck (or Gibson in the same type of situation) going into a strat type cavity the tech might need to add a few shims or plane away a little bit of wood. Doubt its much more than this for a like to like switch... Really don't know though as I've never tried so suggest you talk to a guitar tech at your local shop.

Anyone else?

Cheers,
Tony

Posted by: fkalich Jul 26 2007, 01:18 AM

provided that the scale is the same. which it may not be. it would not surprise me if they generally do make the scales longer on the 24 frets, to make the tiny spacing at the top frets a little less tiny.

if the scale on the new neck is not the same, you will have to move the bridge.

Posted by: goat Jul 26 2007, 04:17 PM

Trust me, you don't wanna have to move the bridge

These are my experiences, some of this stuff's been said and it's a little too early still for me to be making sense but here ya go ;p

The Peavey Tracer is IIRC a 25.5" scale guitar (just did a little googling, so far Google confirms this, I'd still measure the length from nut-bridge just to be sure), which may make it easier to fit a 24 fret neck to as it's more common to find one in the longer scales. There are still a lot of obstacles to consider, though.. as has been said, the profile of the neck, the shape of the heel and tenon and how it fits into the neck pocket (if the guitars in question have a neck angle, is the angle cut into the tenon or into the pocket?)... also, a lot of 24 fret bolt-on necks have the last few frets overhanging the tenon... on a single pickup guitar like the Tracer you don't have to worry about the fretboard bumping into the neck pickup, but depending on the depth of the pocket/tenon and profile of the neck it might stick out and look goofy or need to be raised with a shim so the fretsboard sits above the pocket, or worse: depending on the neck angle, it might totally bone your string action at the upper frets to a degree you can't fix by adjusting the bridge height.

And then there's always the possibility (common when swapping necks even between models of the same make) that the neck length from nut-heel and the body length from bridge-pocket won't add up to the scale length the neck was designed for, totally screwing up your intonation and making the guitar+neck combo useless. As long as you get that 12th fret halfway between the nut and the bridge, you should be able to correct the intonation at the bridge saddles just like you would on any other axe.

I recently fit a neck to a non-matching guitar... had to cut down and reshape the neck tenon to bring the neck into scale with the body length (even this was hairy since I didn't know if I was going to run into the truss rod channel or not) and at the end of the day it had gone from a bolt-on neck to a set neck but it can be done with a little TLC, a little hand-tooling, and a good amount of planning (and maybe a little planing too ).

Ask your eBay seller for as many measurements as you can think of. You'll probably have to make a few minor alterations to the neck in any case, but knowing is half the battle between the used necks people rip off their guitars on eBay and the premade necks for sale out there you should be able to find something at least CLOSE to what you need.

Posted by: Evan Jul 27 2007, 09:56 PM

As long as the scale length is the same between two necks, the number of frets won't matter provided that both necks fit properly onto the guitar. The fret spacing is controlled by the scale length only and doesn't change based on the number of frets -in other words, the first 22 frets of a 24 fret neck will line up exactly with the frets of a 22 fret neck of the same scale length. So, in theory, it's possible to put a 24 fret neck in place of your 22 fret neck.

In practice though, converting necks usually isn't very easy. The reason it's usually a problem is that the length of the heel on the neck and the location of the neck screws is often different for 24 fret necks compared to 22 fret necks.

Here's how an article I wrote about scale length with instructions on how to measure the scale length of a neck in case you needed to know how to do it:
 Scale_Length_Draft.pdf ( 714.21K ) : 660


Regardless of what new neck you get, here's what has to be correct for it to work with your guitar:

The neck must be of the same scale length, or you will need to move the bridge.

The heel of the neck must be able to physically fit into the neck pocket of the guitar body. The tighter the fit, the better the tone.

The thickness of the heel and angle of the flat part on the bottom of the heel where the neck screws go in must match the original neck. Most of the time, this angle is just parallel to the fretboard and you only have to worry about the thickness -but the angle and thickness still have to match so the fingerboard ends up at the same height and angle from the guitar body as the old neck.

Once the neck is screwed in, the nut must be in the same place as it was on the old neck -everything else aside, if the nut ends up in the same place and the scale length matches, you'll be fine. The distance from the face of the nut to the center of the trem's pivot screws or the posts of a tune-o-matic bridge should match the scale length of the guitar -in this case I guess that's 25.5".

Hope that helps some -any questions just let me know. Good luck! -and don't worry it's really not as hard as it sounds.

Posted by: shredmandan Jul 27 2007, 10:39 PM

Thankyou all for your responses .I really apperciate it.I'm excited about finding a new neck and rebuilding this guitar from scratch basically.It was my first guitar and it has that sentamental value to me,as i would like to hand it down to my son in afew years to learn on.How cool would that be for my son to learn to play on the first electric that i learned on I hope so bad that he will want to play.I will not force him to it has to be his choice.The only thing im very firm on is once he says 'yes dad i want to play'' there will be no quiting from there. I want to teach him that once he starts something in life he finishes it.Any of you have children of your own that play guitar?and if so how did they get interested.

Thanks again
Shredmandan

This was great help dude thanks