Mutant Guitar Neck Placement

OK, so I'm trying to cross breed a crappy Les Paul copy body I have with a strange Strat replacement neck I bought on e-bay and it suddenly dawned on me (I was having too much fun planning the electrickery) that I need to place the neck and bridge so that the scale matches the placement of the frets on the neck otherwise it'll all go pear shaped.

I set about measuring the first few frets and working backwards from the spreadsheet described in Melvyn Hiscock's delightful book, I tried to calculate the scale length the neck has been built for. Unfortunately it seems it was about 25 1/4 inches, which seems odd, as it's inbetween the 24 3/4 expected for Gibson style necks and the 25 1/2 inches for a Fender replacement. Is it likely I've miscalculate and it's a 25 1/2 inch scale? Here are some of the first few fret distances in case anyone fancies trying to work it out:

Nut to 1st - 36mm 1st to 2nd - 34mm 2nd to 3rd - 32mm 3rd to 4th - 30.5mm 4th to 5th - 29mm

What does anyone think? What scale should I put it on as. I've got both the neck placement and bridge placement to take into account, so there's a little bit of leeway in where I put it.

Cheers for any help.

<snip>

Clever!

Yeah, I just realised that last night - where do I measure the scale length to on the bridge?! I guess that's why they have the intonation - so you don't have to be precise on the bridge placement (well within reason).

Cheers Paul.

I've always wondered about this as I at one time had a lot of spare necks lying around and wanted to build a guitar from scratch.

Can't you just measure the distance between the nut and the 12th fret, then make sure you bolt the neck on so you have the same distance between the 12th fret and the bridge?

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Measure from the inside of the nut to the center of the 12th fret, then multiply by two to get the scale length of the guitar.

Then just bolt the neck on so you have the same distance from the center of the 12th fret to the bridge.

I built a few "franken-guitars" over the years, and it's always been fun! Let us know how it turns out...