Mighty Mite strat neck=Sucks

cephus

cephus

Slow Children Playing
I bought a mighty mite strat neck w/ floyd nut rout offa ebay and finished buttoning it up last night.

I am pretty sure it was just like this one/same vendor:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Fender-Licensed...ryZ41423QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

It's not the vendor's fault, I'm sure, but this thing feels like shit. It's really big around. It feels like the back of the neck has the C profile, but the sides make it feel more like a capital U.

The neck also just has a really cheesy cheapo feel to it. The auction says it has a satin finish, but this feels like bare wood to me. We'll see how well it repels dirt.

I have had and set up alot of shitty guitars. Some of them have taken me a few tries to get them to a useable state. When I was tuning this thing up last night for the first time, I got the feeling like it was too fuct independent of bows/twists/shitty frets/etc, just because it felt cheap and shitty.

If you thought that one of those cheapie ebay mighty mite necks would go great on your strat copy, my advice, kiddies, is to save your pennies and get a warmoth or other $200+ neck rather than the $125 ones. I am a cheap fux0r and you have to know that this thing is a total piece of shit for me to be complaining about it.

If I get to spend a few minutes on it tonight and make any improvement, I'll let you know.
 
I am expecting delivery of mine tomorrow. It will be rosewood with compound radius FB. Had a major hassle just getting it. Sorry to learn that they are POS....oh welll

chazba
 
I was just being a bitch. I'm sure I'll be able to coax into some semblance of a guitar neck. I am at work. I should have thrown it into the back of the car. I bet if I shimmed it, I could get it playable and then look into why the profile seems so uncomfortable.

I am starting to think that the stock Kramer Focus neck that was on there was a really good neck. I have had a few people compliment it (when it was on my homemade guitar). It isn't flat or thin. the neck has some meat and the FB some radius. It has big frets. Too bad the guitar tech said it was twisted and not worth fucking with.
 
I have the Tele neck from the same company. The Satin finish does look like bare wood, you're right, but it holds up okay over time.

Btw, did yours fit okay into a strat pocket? Mine did, but I've heard that some of them are too wide for current, regular sized strat routs.

Oh, and a lot of them have a separate maple slab fingerboard AND a skunk stripe, which is weird.

Mine feels great, for what it's worth. Great fret job, too.

AFAIK, they're made by Cort.
 
i have had decent luck with a few MM necks, but i will have to say, they are in no way half the neck that a warmoth is, i have built many guitars over the years and i always go back to warmoth, gotta love em
 
i would strongly recommend USACG

awesome necks, mine is perfect.

i finished it with 2 coats of wipe-on poly, and it feels like raw polished wood...

perfect fret job, awesome pau ferro fretboard, here's a pic:


neckjointclosevm5.jpg
 
cephus said:
I was just being a bitch. I'm sure I'll be able to coax into some semblance of a guitar neck. I am at work. I should have thrown it into the back of the car. I bet if I shimmed it, I could get it playable and then look into why the profile seems so uncomfortable.

I am starting to think that the stock Kramer Focus neck that was on there was a really good neck. I have had a few people compliment it (when it was on my homemade guitar). It isn't flat or thin. the neck has some meat and the FB some radius. It has big frets. Too bad the guitar tech said it was twisted and not worth fucking with.
Click to expand...

If you dont want it let me know, is it maple on maple? I have a focus 2 neck Rosewood on maple I'll trade you.
 
Saying they suck is a bit too much. They are a mediocre neck which can be had really cheap. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Hey, I've told you guys enough times to go with a Warmoth or a USA Custom Guitars neck if you want a GOOD neck. What were you expecting?


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I put a capo on it and played it for a while . I have to file the nut land. It's like 2mm too shallow. It has settled down some. It's frustrating me at the moment becuase I wasted a bunch of time trying to be subtle and making minor adjustment so fo the truss rod trying to get some relief. It had no perceptible effect to me. After like half a turn one eighth at a time I said to hell with it and loosened it way up. It's still straight as an arrow. Maybe it was on the boat too long. I have it sitting downstairs on the couch a way that I never set my guitars to see if it need encouraged. I manhandled it pretty good, too. I could get it to flex where it needed to be, but then it just goes back to straight.

Will it take a long time to get used to being on a guitar?
 
cephus said:
I put a capo on it and played it for a while . I have to file the nut land. It's like 2mm too shallow. It has settled down some. It's frustrating me at the moment becuase I wasted a bunch of time trying to be subtle and making minor adjustment so fo the truss rod trying to get some relief. It had no perceptible effect to me. After like half a turn one eighth at a time I said to hell with it and loosened it way up. It's still straight as an arrow. Maybe it was on the boat too long. I have it sitting downstairs on the couch a way that I never set my guitars to see if it need encouraged. I manhandled it pretty good, too. I could get it to flex where it needed to be, but then it just goes back to straight.

Will it take a long time to get used to being on a guitar?
Click to expand...

A single action truss rod won't add relief to a neck on its own, as you probably know, and when the neck left the factory, there probably wasn't any tension on the rod. So loosening it won't do a whole lot as is.
 
32-20-Blues said:
A single action truss rod won't add relief to a neck on its own, as you probably know, and when the neck left the factory, there probably wasn't any tension on the rod. So loosening it won't do a whole lot as is.
Click to expand...


Not QUITE true. Sure, it's probably true with a Mighty Mite neck, but you CAN build guitars with single action truss rods which can be used to deal with back bow issues. It's all in how you build your neck. Some guys glue on their fingerboards in such a way as to force an excess of bow into the neck (which they then have to get rid of by tightening the truss rod - Jim Olson was the first guy I heard of doing this), or you can do what we do. We install the truss rod, and then we tighten it a bit (putting a bit of back bow in the neck) before we level the gluing surface and glue on the fingerboard. Either way, you have a neck which is straight while having a tight truss rod. It works very well, and you can use the traditional Gibson style truss rod (which is more effective and more reliable than any of the "double acting" truss rods).


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I Win Again!!!!

Relief shmrelief. As of 1100 hours I have strangled this neck into submission. Last night I took a wood rasp and 3 or 4 other files, plus 5 hours to produce one teaspoon of rosewood-colored banana wood sawdust and get the nut sitting low enough to make the thing playable.

The neck looks absolutely straight to me. It didn't flinch a bit when the strings were installed. Nor when it was tuned up a whole step with the trem blocked. Nor when I sat it on the couch witha pillow and a strategically placed 10 pound weight. The neck is extremely substantial. I have decent sized hands. I can't really flop my thumb over the top to mute ala james marshall hendrix.

That's the gripes. The good things? I love feeling relaxed about taking a wood rasp to a $125 neck rather than a $250 one. The frets were rough on the ends, so I used a couple emory boards and cleaned them up one night. I was afraid the tops would be bad, too, but after playing they seem pretty decent to me. There are no abrupt buzzy spots. The frets are really tall and I am used to playing ragged out old flat frets. I don't know of they're supposed to be that way or not. It feels weird, but I can get around on the neck. I probabaly am faster on my strat, but this one will end up easily being a tier-two guitar for me. I'd play a gig on it now as long as I had something decent like the jambolin as a backup.

I bought a couple sets of 9s today. I want to try this guitar with them. THe floyd just feels too rigid with 10s. I'd like to have one guitar that is set up optimized for that certain type of playing that I always avoided. Makes me feel like shit. It's the musical equivalent of a middle aged guy buying a corvette convertable to feel younger.
 
I finally recieved the neck I specified. Rosewood with compound radius FB. I have never tried a CR board so it will be interesting. The unit they sent to replace the POS original neck has lots of fine birds-eyes and very nice grain to it. I had bought a set of Fender logo tuners at a great price from the local dealer. When I finally got around to installing them I found that only 2 were the correct item. The other 4 are something weird. with short stubby string posts without holes for the strings. I'll take em back of course but I lost the reciept in the interim, so wish me luck.


chazba
 
I looked. Next time, I'll look again and probably buy. I already have 6 hours dicking oaround with this one. It is playable and has personality. It's not the best neck in the corral. It's fun to have the guitar back in service, tho.
 
Light said:
Not QUITE true. Sure, it's probably true with a Mighty Mite neck, but you CAN build guitars with single action truss rods which can be used to deal with back bow issues. It's all in how you build your neck. Some guys glue on their fingerboards in such a way as to force an excess of bow into the neck (which they then have to get rid of by tightening the truss rod - Jim Olson was the first guy I heard of doing this), or you can do what we do. We install the truss rod, and then we tighten it a bit (putting a bit of back bow in the neck) before we level the gluing surface and glue on the fingerboard. Either way, you have a neck which is straight while having a tight truss rod. It works very well, and you can use the traditional Gibson style truss rod (which is more effective and more reliable than any of the "double acting" truss rods).


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
Click to expand...
Yep, I've done this quite a bit. It's a common way to build in relief. You can do a lot while the neck is being put together.

Those Mighty Mite necks are pretty naff though, best avoided. Spend the extra few quid for a decent one. You can make them play well but they need some work.
 
Well I finished the install and now I find out that the frets need serious dressing. They are tearing up my fingers with their pointy ends. Except for that, I like the neck. I think I'll take this one to the luthier.

chazba
 
If I was building a strat project...and was going to take a total crap shoot on ebay for parts....I would buy a squire strat for $100.
IMO squire necks are VERY good...they just need some fret work and tinting.
I would take the neck off the squire, take the cheapo keys off the headstock, part out the body and sell all the parts on ebay to the highest bidder.
That way you would have $50 or less in a neck, that would blow away the cheap assed mighty mite crap.
I would sand the squire logo off the neck and either leave it blank, put a personalized logo on it, or put a fender spagetti logo on it.

my 2 cents
 
The ends of the frets stick out a few /1000's of a inch and the sharp edges hurt my fingers. Anybody got info on how to file it off so it's more comfortable???

chazba
 
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