Workshop: Tacoma Bolted Neck Joint

I worked on that Tacoma EM9 a while back and, after it'd been strung up a couple days, I noticed that the neck joint pulled forward again. I was going to say "screw it" and do my usual over-under drywall screw repair to reinforce the bolted joint, but decided to open it up and see what was going on instead.

After removing the bolts and the fretboard extension, the neck came right off. You can see I have a bolt installed a little in the above pic. I wanted to see why it seemed like they were stripping out. But, when I tightened it...

...it turned-out that the block that Tacoma had glued into the heel was actually loose! I just grabbed the bolt at this point and yanked it out. They used a block like this so they could install locking, threaded inserts from the rear, but of course the epoxy must have failed.

After removing this junk, I re-epoxied the retainer and adjusted the neck angle via sanding the edges of the heel. I want a nice tall saddle on this, so I knocked it back a ways and will probably have to cut a thicker, deeper saddle slot when I put a new one in during setup.