StewMac - Shaped Neck / Heel Shims for Guitar

It is incredibly common on bolt on neck guitars to need to shim the neck to further refine/improve it's setup. This may be simply because the pocket is a little deep, too parallel to the body, to dial in setup after a bigsby install (for example), to improve bridge/string break angle or simply to better dial in setup to suit personal preferences.

You will often see small paper shims nestled in the heel of the pocket even from the factory on many Fender guitars, it's that commonly done/needed. Shimming the neck pocket is incredibly normal to see, and is so often beneficial to get the very best from a specific instruments setup. Particularly so on offset Fenders (Jazzmasters, Jaguars etc) due to their floating bridge/ vibrato design where shimming neck improves bridge height and therefore break angle over the bridge. So there are a number of reasons why you would need to shim the heel/pocket on your 4 bolt neck. But there are bad, and good ways to do it;

More often than not, people do this with paper, veneer or plastic shims cut and placed at the very heel of the pocket, which although can initially work, isn't the best solution (particularly not in the long run). This is because of gaps that will be made in the neck heel to pocket mating surfaces, which isn't ideal. One of the very best solutions on the market today, is the full pocket neck shims made by StewMac, and as an authorised StewMac wholesale partner, I am proud to offer these shims here at the Home of Tone! For us in the UK, this helps as ordering these from StewMac directly puts many players off due to international postage and import duty costs. 

These ingenius shims are actually tapered, and cover the full neck pocket. 

Small, paper, veneer or plastic type shims create an unwanted gap under the heel of the neck: a dead air space where humidity condenses to swell the wood. As luthier Dan Erlewine describes in his book  "This gap may cause an upward kink in the neck. And many players feel they lose tone unless firm contact is maintained between the neck and the body.".

Dan creates tapered shims that cover the entire heel of the neck—with these ready-made tapered shims, that work is done for you. 

They may seem pricey, especially when you compare to throwing a card or veneer shim at the heel, but trust me, your guitar will thank you in the long run for using a StewMac shim.