Seeing as my most advanced woodworking projects up to this point were speaker boxes, I decided that building a neck might be a bit ambitious for a first try. I've grown attached to my B string, in spite of the fact that I mostly just use it as a thumb rest, so I decided to see what I could find.
I noticed that Dingwall licenced their fret design from Novax, so I figured I'd check out the Novax site. Unfortunately, I didn't see any 5 string necks, only a 4. The headstock is fugly, and it's sort of a hack, designed to retrofit onto a fender. It had relatively little fan and had the parallel fret around the 15th fret or so, which puts the nut at quite a sharp angle. There's very little fan at the bridge, since it's designed to work on a normal horizontal bridge, abusing the intonation adjustment as far as they can safely get away with. They're also really expensive, currently $580 US list on their site (with an ebony fretboard). I decided that was a dead end, and that I would just buy an unlined fretless neck and fret it myself.
I wanted a neck through, so after browsing around, Carvin.com looked like the place to get it, since they had a 5 string fretless neck-through neck. Unforunately, when I called them, the options are pretty much limited to what's on their website. I had decided on a 37 inch (480mm actually) B string, so I needed a longer body than their standard neck through is lengthed for. I phoned them, but they said they couldn't do a longer one. At that point I figured I could do a 3/4 neck through, which might look funny but should work okay. I asked to get it completely unmarked. They said they could do the face without inlays or lines, but all of their fretless necks come with side dots. At that point I decided that making it work would be too much of a hack, so I decided to look elsewhere.
Warmoth had no neck-throughs but they had some really nice looking bolt on necks. The "Gecko" line in particular interested me. A nice laminated neck, with a good selection of wood options available in 3 different sizes. I gave them a call and they said that no markings was fine, the only caveat was that if I wanted it without side dots it would be non-returnable since it wasn't one of their "standard" options. I was planning on attacking it with the fretsaw right away, so the returnability was pretty much moot anyhow.
I ordered the wide neck, a swamp ash body blank, some Gotoh tuners, some Hipshot single string bridges (more about that later), and the rest of the misc hardware on their "gecko" hardware list. At this point I had already decided on Red with Gold hardware, so I figured gold fretwire would be a nice touch. I made an order with lmii.com for 12 feet of their "Evo Gold" fretwire (lots more than I needed), a fretsaw, and one each of their red and black powdered aniline dyes.
I wanted to angle my pickups to at least aproximate the bridge angle, so I decided to see what I could find that was nice and wide. After some browsing around I ran into the q-tuners. They looked really cool, with the transparent cases where you can see the red wire coils, which I thought would look nice with the red body. The reviews and sound clips all seemed really good, so I decided to splurge. I'm sure I could have saved a lot of money if I shopped around for something a little more conventional. I grabbed the 6 string version to give me the width I needed to make up for the angle.
