It’s been a while and I wanted to share a story in hopes that you good people won’t make the same boneheaded mistake I just did.

I haven’t built a canjo in several years and decided to get back into it. So I used Fret2Find to print out a template of the fretboard -- 18” scale. Then, as usual, I taped the printout to the neck, scored each fret line with an X-Acto knife and proceeded to go on fretting.

I thought it came out great…nice and smooth, very playable. EXCEPT…. The intonation was WAY off. At first I thought the action was too high and maybe I could lower the action by filing the nut and fix it that way. But then I measured the neck again and realized that somehow the scale was not 18”, but closer to 17”. I was off by a full inch (30mm)!

What could account for the discrepancy? Apparently, I had the printer set to “fit image into printable area.” In short, the computer printout was smaller than actual size. D’OH!

Well, I didn’t want to waste this nice neck, so I measured the distance from nut to 12^th fret and came up with 215mm, and doubled that to calculate that the scale was actually 16.9” (430mm). So now I’m thinking, if I move the bridge (or, Spam can) up about an inch, I might be able to salvage the neck.

I made a quick cut, moved the can up and voila. I now have a canjo with 17” scale and very good intonation.

 I have learned a lot from reading success stories here but maybe someone can learn from my epic fail. At least there was a happy ending and no else one has to know.