What exactly is neck angle?

Trying another shot by myself this time to build a Stew Mac kit using the knowledge gained here to make this one a little better build. But I seen that a lot of build posts have talked about neck angle before setting the neck in place. Is this only for custom builds from scratch or does the Stew Mac already have the correct neck angle adjusted for. I was trying to grasp the concept of what its purpose is as I seen Pete comment on not worrying about neck angle. Other posts say that the bridge and top of frets should be in-line and others saying it should land below the bridge. Really trying to visualize how it would affect tone, sound or action.

I think I understand it, so I will say what I believe I know.
Neck angle is important to insure that the string height at the bridge will be correct.
I build my ukes with a radiused top of roughly 20'. If I mate the neck to the body at 90* to the sides, my bridge and saddle would have to be too thin to be functional. However if I set the neck back 1/2* off of 90*, on a tenor, my string height at the bridge will be right around 1/2" off the top at the bridge. This gives me a bridge of about 3/8" and an exposed saddle of about 1/8". obviously there are variables in this, such as fingerboard thickness, fret wire height, and so on.

Also setting the neck back helps the fingerboard extension lay flat to the top, and not have a small gap between the top and the fingerboard at the neck joint. I hope that all makes sense.

I have never built a kit so I would not know, but i would assume that the kits have the angles figured out, otherwise the the string height would not be correct at the bridge... you could just put a square to the neck and see if it is cut at an angle. I have not heard of anyone fetting the neck on one of the stew mac kits.

Neck angle is for guitars so some people think - I never used it and had no problerms with bridge thickness. I totally ignore it for my ukulele. This means my bridges are nice and delicvate - about 1/4" thick and my saddle height is kept to minimum. After all, you don't want a huge clunky bridge on your featherlight build do you?

Disclaimer:
This stuff works for me and I suspect there will be many counter agruments to this. Read everything, forget it all and do your own thing

Pete,I love this, may I use it?
" Read everything, forget it all and do your own thing"

When I assembled the Grizzly, early on I checked to see where the string height would be at the saddle. I didn't want way high action or a way low saddle. I ended up thinning the bridge a little (like Pete is saying) and action and saddle height turned out great. Clamp the neck up to the body without the fingerboard, lay a straight edge and you'll see if there's any neck angle.

I have two tenors in the spray booth now. One with and one without some neck angle. I am used to putting about 7 degrees of neck angle on mandolins and 1.5 degrees on octave mandolins. It is important on arch top instruments because the bridge often sits on the top of the arch while the neck joint is below the arch which means you have to angle it in order to get the strings to work. Normally, adding some neck angle allows for the strings to be parallel to the fret board plane so that you can adjust the action low.

I drew a little diagram

If you build with a truly flat top, then there is no need to worry about any neck angle (pitch).

If you build with a dome or radius in the top as is almost universal in acoustic guitars then you will need to pitch the neck (so head stock is lower than plane of soundboard) in order to get the correct action of strings over the frets, plus the required bridge and saddle hight.

I build with a dome in the lower bout of my ukes, so I pitch the neck in order to achieve the action I want whilst keeping my bridge and saddle height to my design goals. That being a bridge that is 6.5mm - 7.0mm tall and saddle that protrudes approximately 2.5mm - 3.0mm. This gives me a theoretical string hight over soundboard of between 9.0mm - 10.0mm. And this is what I'm shooting for on my builds.

Now to illustrate not picking the neck back. In order to get the string action correct I would need to reduce the height of my bridge and saddle in order to compensate. This then affects the string height over the soundboard. Or the other thing you see quite often is that the bridge and saddle are the standard height but because the neck doesn't have a pitch to it the string action is far, far too high. To fix this the saddle needs to be lowered, but sometimes there isn't enough left to get those strings down, so the action is left too high, and then you create issues with break angle.

If all of this still doesn't make sense to you, then get out the pencil and paper and draw out the side profile of your instrument. Start with the strings and work down from there. Don't forget the height of you frets, thickness of the fret board and the desired break angle and string height over soundboard. Do one for a flat top, and another for one with some sort of dome or radius. You'll quickly get a grasp of how complex some of this can be. Then you have to factor in the elasticity of wood, and it's tendency to expand and contract with humidity fluctuations.

Few people that purchase instruments have any inkling of what goes into building them so that they have a chance of holding together, and play well in diverse temperature and humidity situations.

And a picture may help you understand. This one is on the bench right now.

Here is a simple way to check the neck angle, by doing so, you will understand exactly what neck angle is and how it affects the instrument.
Use a straight ruler (same size as the nut to saddle distance), lay on top of the fret board , touching the nut at one end.
a) The other end should lay right on top of the bridge if the neck angle is correct.
b) the second end of the ruler goes below the bridge, the instrument needs a neck reset (or try to sell it to a dummy !!! I have seen a few folks doing that on CL)
c) the second end of the ruler goes above the bridge, the angle is wrong, but you can use a very high bridge and saddle for that to some extent.
I recently glue the neck to the body and ensure that the condition (a) is met.
When buying an used instrument (cheaper price), watch out for this. Many folks dump their junk instruments on the poor novices.

You could read about it for days or just do this.

Allen said:

get out the pencil and paper and draw out the side profile of your instrument.

Click to expand...

kkmm said:

Use a straight ruler (same size as the nut to saddle distance), lay on top of the fret board , touching the nut at one end.
a) The other end should lay right on top of the bridge if the neck angle is correct.

Click to expand...

I would like to emphasize that he said "top of the bridge", not "top of the saddle". (If the tops of all your frets were in line with the top of the saddle, every stopped string would buzz.) You then rely on an appropriately sized saddle to raise the strings off of the frets.