Guitar building tips & hints

Just a few tips I stumbled upon.

Installing threaded inserts

Threaded inserts can be very usefull when making a guitar cabinet, amplifier enclosures or even for guitar building e.g.  for attaching a bolt on neck to a body.

But how you should properly install threaded inserts hardly anybody knows. I found this little video on how to install them but I still had issues.

My issue was that I couldn’t get the threaded insert out of the wood when I tried to. After experimenting I found out that the type of wood is very important for choosing what drill to use when making a hole. On a piece of scrap wood, a 9 mm drill was excellent for drilling a hole for my threaded insert. I could easily insert and remove the threaded insert. But when I tried this on a maple neck, no way I could remove the threaded insert.

But when I used a slightly bigger drill (9.5 mm), everything worked fine. Removing the threaded insert was a piece of cake.

So always give it a try on a piece of scrap wood of the same type you will finally install the threaded inserts. And if removing doesn’t work, try a slightly bigger drill.

High quality wood drills in almost all sizes can be found at www.baptist.nl.