Workshop: '60s Rocket Neck Revamp

A while back, I'd been working on modding an old Rocket to a customer's specs. He wound-up not liking the neck he'd chosen for it -- and while he had a couple of Rocket (and similar Harmony) necks on hand, neither suited him. He sent this one out as a wrecker to get spruced-up for use, however, and hopefully it'll work for him.

This came to me with a bad routing job for a truss rod (apparently never installed) and remnants of the original junk-wood board clinging to the neck and the neck's top surface pocked and chipped-out.

I routed it for a simple truss rod with aluminum U-channel surround for it, epoxied that in, and then fit and fretted a 24 1/8" (standard Harmony) scale length rosewood fretboard to it. He'd supplied original celluloid dots and a truss rod cover so I used those.

It has medium frets, a zero fret behind a new bone nut, and Gotoh relic/aged Kluson-style tuners.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of wear and tear on the sides/back of the neck from use/abuse and previous machinations towards modding the neck, but it's now perfectly straight, very stiff, and feeling nice.

The neck had been over-drilled for a simple steel rod at one point, but if the current rod should fail at some point, at least it'd be easy to slip a new one in, eh?