Hofner HCT Contemporary 500/1 Neck on a Vintage German Hofner Body.

[Music] foreign let's just talk about this for a second I have a German body and some many German parts that I wanted to face but I couldn't find a decent German neck and probably take a contemporary base take that neck and modify it to put on a German base here is the assembled base this is it oh guys EJ from BackBeat it's been a little while since I put out a video and I was looking through some of my stock here and I was looking for maybe a project we could do together through the years on a lot of the German bases that I've worked on I've saved a lot of parts miscellaneous Parts here and there got a lot of different things that I want to show you and I'll put some b-roll stock in here to show but I have things from like you know different bodies and I think I have one hanging up right here and then some other parts that I have all kinds of stuff I have a lot of vintage from 59 all the way up to 67 control units all kinds of stuff I'm still looking through what I have to see if I have any necks necks are hard to come by and the used ones out there are usually pretty beat have a lot of serious problems so that's a lot of work for me to do but I have an idea on how we can come up with a neck for this so let's go ahead and see what we got and let's see what we come up with should be an interesting video let's give it a shot so we just got done talking about this project that we have to find a neck back I'm pretty sure I'll look around a little more but I'm pretty sure I don't have one that is that doesn't require a whole lot of work and when you think about whether it's refreading or a warped tail that goes over the body or refinishing all that type of stuff that's a lot of work and you know it's not I don't think we want to put that kind of time into something like that first thing we got to review is there are two types of necks out there I've done videos on this there's the dovetail which I still call a keystone and then there's the mortise and Tenon neck and that's uh different the body that I'm most likely going to use is this one this one as you can see right here is already cut out for a dovetail neck joint the third neck that I'm thinking of is the Contemporary neck the Contemporary neck is very much like a dovetail neck those necks are identical to the German necks it's a lot cheaper to go out and buy a used HCT contemporary 501 base you can usually get them about five hundred dollars when they're used and there's your neck plus you get a whole bunch of parts right now I'm going to go ahead and pick out the parts that I think at this point that I would want to put on the body right now I'm thinking that this is the body we want to use it's in good shape it's obviously got the smaller slot here for the earlier style unit and again we just talked about this it has a dovetail joint some of the items that I would like to use I've laid out here you know I've got no big deal here on the bridge this is a earlier um German tailpiece you can see it has the nice curve on the top here I have this beautiful 1962 control unit works great no crackling as the earlier style capacitors on it early style plug this one even has the orange or red washer that the original ones came with um I have a set of 62 pickups now I also have right over here a set of the 61s but these are the new German ones these over here are vintage I thought we would at least go since this is 62 let's go with 62 style you can see it has the logo and the screws beautiful and then I have the a nice early pickguard that'll help us with the placement of the pickups and I thought this would be a good thing to do for that early 60s style along with this stuff so let me lay it out on the guitar and I'll give you a shot of that here is my mock-up of the body using the German parts all German Parts I think this is this is a German part but it's not vintage all of these items are vintage so um and in keeping with that I thought on the headstock I would use these these are my vintage two on a plate tuners I was able to find a donor base that had problems that is a 2022 or 2021 contemporary 501 base and as I said I want to use the neck from this the glue that they used to put this in there would not budge so here's what I had to do I had to cut the neck off now to do that I had to cut the body right through here you'll be able to see when I hold the piece on there where I had to cut I cut this line that's described right here is where the neck comes back to the dovetail joint I cut it back another quarter inch or so and then once I had it off I was able to peel the pieces back away from the neck here it is that is a pleasant surprise this quilts all the rumors about the uh contemporary necks being bolted on with two screws not at all so what I'm doing now is I'm going to strip that neck down and I'm going to fit it to the body let me sew full disclosure here I did have to taper and shave with my files to narrow this a little bit because we already had the this pocket cut so also they give you about an eighth of an inch maybe a little over an eighth inch more than you need our goal here is to get this fret right here right over this seam right here so you can see I need to move it back so I will simply shave off some on this side here but let me put this in here just to show you what's going on here we have it that's exactly what I was looking for let me get another view and explain a few of the things I'm doing here to go with the Vintage look that I'm looking for I don't want to have the binding on the side so I'm gonna I pulled The Binding off and it also pulled out the dots no problem they fell right out here's the binding as you can see I was able to peel it off and it did take up a little bit of wood with it in certain areas like right here but that's not a problem because you can see there's a lip there and I'm going to sand that down I'm going to restrip this deck and we're going to sand this so it's flush I want it to look like a non-bound neck and these holes that they have there I'll reuse those once we're done I did take the nut off here also and I am going to remove this piece right here so far so good it's looking good okay so I did some rough sanding and fitting here you can see here where I took the Binding off I trimmed the um Frets and I tapered this in so that we get the non-bound look to this neck I think it's coming out great and I'm going to continue to fit this back here to a little more sanding I also want to show you that this is a contemporary there's I'm going to remove all of that too I thought I'd review this a little bit because this is critical here I was talking about on our project base how I'm trying to get that 17th fret to line up with the joint here here's here this is my 61 I wanted to show you and it's the same on all of these dovetail neck joints so you know here's um 13 14 15 16 17th fret right here and if you see it's lined up and I put my ruler in there to show you that that is where the part of the neck meets the body and that's key because if you're going to be using um you want to do neck resets in the future we're using hide glue this is the Fret normally we would pull drill down two holes put the Steam down in there take the neck out do a reset again that is the back part of this neck this is our contemporary neck so you can see here that it lines up the 17th fret right over that seam now I want to show you on our project what's going on there here on our project base this is the 17th fret I explained that I had pulled the 16th fret thinking of why I did that and that didn't work out but here's the 17th fret and I slid my ruler in where the back of that neck is coming together that's where it needs to be so you can see I need to back the neck into the body about a quarter of an inch or so I'll take a more accurate reading on that and um fit it so it's a nice tight joint here but I wanted to show you how far off that is these issues these things that I'm doing whether it's removing The Binding or having to peel away the other body on the neck and all the work I'm doing is so much less work than what we would have had to do had we found a damaged or warped or whatever neck this is this work is so much easier okay here's an update of where I'm at I went ahead and I put two coats of uh well one coat of sanding sealer on the neck and then um two coats of black lacquer paint um it's looking really good I've uh temporarily installed the tuners you can see what I've done here I went ahead and I used the existing holes for the uh uh fret markers here on the side of the neck I used White and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to on some of these Frets here you can see where it needs a little bit of fill drop fill I'm going to go ahead and do that all the way up both sides of the neck here but I'm real happy with the way this is turning out I need to install the nut I won't do that until I'm ready to put strings on here I do have to shave a little bit off the edge because remember we used to have binding here and I remove that so I'm going to hold off on doing that and but it's looking great you know I've got the neck joint pretty much right where I want it to be give you a close-up shot here I'm real happy with the neck joint I'm going to do something a little different there I'm trying to maintain my Dimension from the body up to the very top of the neck right under the Fret there I want it to be 28 30 seconds that's what I'm shooting for right now but in the neck joint here I'm going to possibly do something slightly different so I can make this adjustable okay guys I think it's time we um take a look at the next step here and what's involved very important step here you know the hardest thing for me to do was to fit the dovetail um neck piece to the joint on the body because we want to have a wood to wood contact on all the sides of the neck to the body you know the glue is not a body filler it doesn't fill gaps what we're trying to do here is get wood to wood so that the hot glue can you know work its way into the wood and form a good Bond if we don't have that if we have air gaps or a not a good fit then it's going to be a bad tone transfer and I don't think that neck joint would probably hold for very long so here's what I need to explain for me to get the neck straight I had to temporarily fit everything to the project let me explain that I'm going to do a little model here we're going to say that this is the body of the base and that this is the tailpiece obviously this is the neck you can see by aiming this so that the strings are centered and we have a good neck joint that's nice and straight and tight not only tight but it's in alignment with where we're going to put the tail piece I'm fortunate on this body that it doesn't look like it's ever been had a tail piece on there but I could see where the factory had a center Mark hole so you can see that if the neck goes on just slightly crooked how far off it is from when the strings come down to the tail piece we don't want to move the tailpiece over much because it's centered right on the center line and it's you know the curve of that tailpiece and the body match perfectly again if it's slightly tipped you can see how far off this is going to be so how do I do that how do I make sure that after fitting the neck into that joint that it is in alignment well I just mentioned earlier that I had an idea something that I've done on one or two other bases I think two other bases and I think it's a great thing we're going to go back in time here a little bit I have a 1967 I believe I did a video on this guitar and I've had a lot of people contact me and say hey I bought this you know mid 60s 67 68 of what can't be 68 to have to be 67 or earlier um guitar but in the guitar case there's this metal rod what is this go to and I've explained to them that before they went to the tongue and groove in 68 late 67. they um somebody I don't know if it was Hoffner or if it was an aftermarket thing put a rod in there that went to the inside of the body a rod that came out through the heel of the base and then they put a strap lock threaded strap lock on there as a nut and inside the body which they were able to get in because by then in 65 when they went to the adjustable pickup it had to have a rectangle cut in the top of the body right in here you know if it would be there would have been a opening right in here see and they could get into the back of that neck block that's right up in here and hold that threaded plate there and then thread the rod in now what that did was it took all the stress off the neck joint but still you got to have a straight neck and a good glue joint for a tone transfer so what I did and I'll show you I'll do some close-up work there and show you what I did the piece that I make that's very reminiscent of what they did in 67. so I went ahead and I got the neck in and I did exactly what I'm telling you I did I drilled a hole through the back of the heel at an angle directly into the neck joint and I put a nutsert it's a little threaded piece that goes into the body it doesn't stick out and I'm able to put the rod in and thread it in I'll show you a close-up on that in a minute by doing that I'm now able to string up the base do everything I need to do to make sure everything is in alignment for example once the neck was in and I know it's in the tail piece and they all line up I used an old set of strings that I had hanging around to make sure that everything wasn't running off the edge of the neck and once I had that in I'm now able to place the pickups where they need to go now I do have my 61 here to measure but I also used as I showed you earlier a um a pickguard a vintage pickguard that shows me the placement also so I knew once we had everything where we wanted it I was able to assemble everything and I need to assemble everything because once I get everything playing and Alignment holes drilled everything's set up then I'm going to take it all apart we're going to do the high glue joint I also want to do some finishing paint and clear work on the neck and a little bit on the body I know this is long and winded but I think it's very important here's what I want to show you now I'm going to show you the assembled base it's a temporary assembly okay so here is the assembled base this is it I'm hoping the lighting and everything here um will give you a good view of what we've done so far and for those who maybe didn't see the beginning of this video what this is is this is a vintage Hoffner German hollow body 62 Parts pickups controller and I could not find a neck a reasonably priced neck from a German so what I did was I took a HCT Hoffner contemporary neck and put it on my German body and just so you know there is a dovetail joint in the contemporary base it's not identical but there's enough meat on there for you to be able to shave off what you need to fit it and that's what this earlier part of the video was about was fitting that to the body and then I just want to be clear on this it's not a perfect fit you can't just pull it off the Contemporary and put it on the German I spent probably two or three days carefully fitting filing shaving with my chisels wood chisels to get a really good neck joint and I'll do some close-ups on this to show you where we're at on that okay I had to turn the lighting up somewhat so I'm hoping this isn't um too hot with lighting but um here it is this is our contemporary neck fitted you can see where I narrowed the nut Took The Binding off and I'll turn the I'll turn this over in a second here to show you that back side of that and I fit everything here that we needed to have fit um and I got this nice and straight everything's on there solid I think it's coming out great you can see the string spacing here you know I can still move the bridge over if I need to because I haven't did the fitting to the bridge I did a video on how to do that so there's so many things that we need to do now from this point that um will show shortly let me turn the base over here's the back side I've installed all the screws fit this in nice we got rid of that bump right there let me see if I can get down here to show you see I like that much better it isn't as abrupt and here is that piece I was telling you about now keep in mind as I stated that this base does not have a glued neck right now what's holding this strung together is the rod that goes down through here and I'll show you those pieces in a second um I did strip the back of the space had a lot of buccal rash on the back I'm going to finish that off too okay so let's let's just talk about this for a second I just want to go back over this in case somebody didn't catch this in the beginning of this video I have a German body and some many German parts that I wanted to put together as a base but I couldn't find a decent German neck most of them are pretty much destroyed or had a lot of Handy work done to them and by the time I pay a lot of money for one of those and do all that work I just thought well wait a minute for about the amount of money that I'm going to pay for a good neck I could probably take a contemporary base one that is damaged and has no use and take that neck and modify it to put on a German base I gotta be honest with you a lot of us have seen pictures out there including some that I've shown in my videos where there was no dovetail joint there were two screws I now realize that maybe that that not had been sawn or snapped off but um I'm not sure maybe early on in the Contemporary lives they weren't using the dovetail all I know is this Black Contemporary that I bought that was damaged um had a dovetail joint in it and the good news was that the glue they used to put it in there I couldn't even steam it loose okay so um earlier on in this video you'll see where I removed a fret and I steamed but that fret was one back towards the nut because I thought it should line up with because there was no dovetail joint that's when I discovered there was I had to stop so my solution there was to cut the neck off through the body without touching that dovetail joint or the neck and then using that base neck for this project I think it's coming out great and um again I got to tell you it wasn't something that you can just do and just quickly bolt it over or move it over and glue it in now but there's enough meat on that neck to be able to do what we did oh I'm real happy with it but what allowed me to do this is this metal rod I put through the neck joint and I want to show that to you now if we could okay so when I talk about through the heel and I specifically said they had used a rod in 67 because in 68 this heel went away and was more of a curve we've got a couple bases like that here but this is what I'm talking about this is a heel obviously it's shaped like a heel and they put a rod right through here um and uh into past the block and the body which ends right about here and then down through the hole in 67 because and I'm saying 65 667 because prior to that like on the 61 there's only a little hole here under this pickup for not just the screws but for the wire to go through and 65 667 when they had that adjustable pickup that goes up and down with the screws on the side with the spring they had to be able to lower it into the body that allowed them to get their hands in there to be able to put the back side of that bolt on we don't have that situation here so let me put this down I'm going to move on to explain that a little better now and I'll grab my 67 at the end of this and show you what I'm talking about so in the body when we have a body like this for hoffner's um the hollow German ones inside this body the block comes down to about here and it comes right across here ends right there so there's the back side okay so on my guitar it wasn't a 65 or later body foreign vintage body or possibly it could be a a reissue body I don't think so though so how do I get to the back side I can't so what I did was I used one of these inside the neck joint of the body I drilled a very small hole and I used what's called a nut cert now you've maybe seen these before let me show you where these are being used and I want to mention that if you look at the Taylor guitar on YouTube factory tour they show you how they put their necks on just with this without any glue interesting way to do it but familiar with it because on my Rec here a lot of you guys might be aware of this that are in the Ricks these strap holder buttons are threaded in with netzer nut certs are called so um I thought well you know there's a way to do it you know this is pretty heavy guitar it's got it back here too and I've actually inserted those on other guitars for just that purpose so in this case what we did was we put this into the block and then once you screw it in and it's threaded backwards so to to put it into the wood you're doing a counterclockwise so that it flushes off doesn't interfere with any wood coming together and when I drill once I clamp the neck and the body at the angle I wanted it which took me like two days to figure out where that was I was able to drill directly through the heel pass the heel into the body we didn't need to go through that wood Block in the body just deep enough to put this little half inch nut cert in once this was in it allowed me to put this bolt and this is a stainless steel oval pan head regular well it is a Phillips head and it's stainless let me see I got to get that just dry okay so once this was in the body I was able to drop this in and um thread it there we have it so I didn't need to get to the back side to put a nut on I used a nut cert there it is on the rod and that's strong what did I do on this side well we can't just have a bolt sticking through there and we need to have a strap button on the base so what I did was I took the um a nice Hefty one I think this came on the Contemporary offer actually has a tapered fit at the top for the the Phillips head screw that was on this had a screw and I drilled it out just a little more so that this fit right down inside there that gives us this okay see looks just like the one down here this is just a screw and two nails and this guy right here and this is the only thing holding the neck on right now okay there's no glue and it's strung with strings under tension I think that's a great solution I will show you the 67 that I was talking about because I want you to see what the actual I don't know if it was Factory or not but what it looked like um I know quite a few of you have gotten hold of me on that saying what is this Bolt so um yeah I I think it was a good solution and I am going to use hot glue in there so for me what I'll have to do in the future to get this neck off was I'll just release that screw that bolt with the strap button on it and then steam It Off change it so forth anyway um without being able to do that it would have been almost impossible for me to carve and fit the neck joint perfectly and just guessing I had to be able to put it on there and put the strings on and line everything up because from the neck you're talking about the tail piece you're talking about the placement of the pickups there's a lot of things that can go wrong that make it hard to intonate or to even sound good for tone but I think we're doing the right thing let me show you that 67 just so I can show you what what I think was a factory repair okay guys this is the 67 I was referring to now hold up I know some of you are going to say wait a minute that's not a 67 it's got staple pickups in it well that's because that I changed that on the space I prefer those pickups but this is a 67 and um I did a video on this quite some time ago a couple years ago but this this strap lock right here if you were to able to see right down in the center here I don't know if we can do that or not I'll try but there's a bolt that's the end of the bolt this strap lock was tapped and threaded so it's acting like a nut and this has the rod going at an angle from the back of the heel to the inside and obviously because these um 67s 66 67s the pickup can go up and down within the body there's an opening here to get to the back of this to put that there was a flat metal plate that had been tapped and threaded great solution it went away because in 68 they went to the mortise and Tenon neck joint this was a great solution has allowed me to um monkey with this neck too quite a bit on and off this is an interesting project I think we've done a few things here the next step is to one I want to say what we've done is we've kind of eliminated the myth of the neck joint on the Contemporary at least the latest ones the ones that I got I think was a 21 or 22 damage has a dovetail neck joint okay and I just want to go over that one more time that it's not an easy conversion but there's enough wood there for you to be able to fit it properly the other thing that we've done here is the next step okay is we need to be able to um now that I know everything aligns properly there is some work I want to do on the neck I'm going to use a satin clear on the black because I don't like the real shiny like that I do like it to look a little worn and I want it to go down the side of the neck where we remove the binding and I wanted to do just a little bit of um CA glue work on the edge of the Frets there where I can see little holes I want to be able to fill those in so that when I clear coat the neck it'll be nice and glossy um the back of the body I'm probably I don't know if I'm going to try to recreate the original Sunburst or I just might do a black back it doesn't matter anyway this base is going to be one of mine that like I said I I'd like to be able to experiment and try different things on different bases up till now this guy's been the one that I've tried a lot of different stuff on it my my issue here with this base that's not really an issue I just want to explain why I put the two pickups close together we all know that in 62 that wasn't an option it ended in 61 like this 61 right here um but when I play I prefer the sound of using both pickups turned on now on the standard pickup placement like this one this is very troubly because it's backed by the bridge that's how it is with guitars by moving it Forward you're getting more of a mid tone and I believe that with these 61s and possibly with the 60s too in the past some of the vintage ones that I've worked on I found where people were moving the connection from the volume um volume number one which is the bridge they're soldering it to the back of the volume pot for one so they that one control just turned the volume on and off for two pickups instead of just one I believe that if you go back to the emergency beat when guys were using these bases I believe that's how they were getting that really low end sound without that real um uh trouble sound that these guys come up with because you know on these bases we don't have a way to blend you know there isn't a blend switch like like some of the rickenbackers had they have that small little blend it moves it from one pickup to the back or in the middle or whatever it's a blend button they don't have them so anyway my preferences that on this body I put the pickups in there the way I like them okay so where we're at on this project is I need to disassemble this base and do a lot of the finishing work fitting like I need to fit the bridge to the body Contour do some wiring I want to do the leveling and re-crowning of the Frets I need to do some paint and some finishing work on the guitar and I also need to do the hide glue on the neck joint so I'm going to do that in part two of this video hopefully if you liked what you've seen I hope that you will subscribe to my channel and give me a thumbs up that would be great and check out some of my other videos on hoffner's done quite a few of them and um thanks for watching and we'll be back soon with the finished product [Music]

Channel: Backbeat Vintage

Views: 5,992

Keywords: how to repair a hofner bass guitar, hofner 500/1 bass repair, Vintage hofner bass repair, hofner luthier, hofner beatle bass repair, hofner bass setup, hofner bass tuneup, Hofner bass, hofner neck reset, Hofner 500/1 modifications, hofner updates, hofner ignition modifications, backbeat vintage, #backbeatvintage, Hofner bass repair, hofner collector, Hofner cavern bass, Hofner ignition cavern upgrade, Hofner bass upgrades, Hofner bass tone, Hofner ignition tone

Id: EzSVUrg0K1U

Length: 36min 40sec (2200 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022