Guitar neck work

Rydawg · Post by **Rydawg** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 11:26 am

as i mentioned in another post im planning on refurbishing my strat copy. when i looked at the neck it looks kinda like it twists (when 2 others look at it, who know a bit more than me they say its not too bad)
so i did a bit of reading and instead of replacing the neck i think im gonna attempt to do some work to it and see if i can get it into reasonable shape. im gonna refret it, and refinish it as the frets are in rough shape. hopefully it'll turn out right and i can keep the guitar as original as possible (electronics will be replaced)

on that note, where would i find the tools to do this? have any of you done this before?

Barry · Post by **Barry** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 5:29 pm

Hey Rydog,
I wish I could help you out but like I said elsewhere I've never heard of a neck actually twisting before--warping up or down yes, twisting no. The only thing I can imagine that would cause that would be a material defect in the wood grain (uneven density or some such thing). I suppose it's also possible that uneven string tension over time in storage might cause it, but that's really a stretch.

In my knowledge of wood working I don't know of any easy way to "untwist" a piece of wood short of pressure steaming it under weight which is likely not an option here. Planing it is not an easy option, but if you're thinking of fret replacement...? (Would also destroy the position markers.)

Bottom line: if it's lousy enough wood to twist it probably isn't worth saving.

Here's one more thought though...depending on how it twists, it may be possible to correct it by resetting the neck "heel" angle somehow. I mention this because i just had one of my Ovations reset at Twelfth Fret in Toronto. This is normally done on acoustic guitars to correct a neck which has been pulled forward over time, but I don't know if it's possible to do anything about angles in the opposite direction. If your neck is a bolt-on, maybe??

Any chance of getting a picture of it, sighting along the length from the headstock? From what you said, it sounds like it may not be as bad as you first feared? It would be nice to retain it if at all possible.

As a final consideration you could remove the headstock and have it professionally attached to a new neck--a lot of work though, and not cheap.

*sigh* good luck

Rydawg · Post by **Rydawg** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 6:52 pm

its definitely not as bad as i first thought. its not a severe twist really. looking down the neck now that ive removed the nut from it it looks straighter, i dunno if the nut was cut wrong or something, but it was like an optical illusion or something. looking down the neck towards the headstock it looked like it slanted to the left (the side where the low e would be). in the next few days i'll be back at the shop where i have a few good straight edges long enough for to check if its good or not.

Barry · Post by **Barry** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 10:00 pm

Well that's encouraging news! Yeah, throwing a straight edge on that sucka is really the best way to tell for sure.

I did a bit of reading up and found this reference which you might find helpful:
http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com/neckrepair2.htm
And here's something else to consider from another discussion:

How badly twisted is it and in which direction? Is it due to the wood itself twisting or the reaction to the truss-rod tension?

Gibsons often suffer from truss-rod twist BTW - it produces a twist where the headstock is rotated counterclockwise relative to the body, when looking down the neck from the head end. You can often tell if it's this by slackening the truss-rod entirely and leaving the guitar to settle down for a few days - if the twist goes away, it's this. You can often help it by lubing the truss-rod adjuster before re-tightening it, since the twisting force is caused by unreleased friction between the nut and the D-plate, not the compression force itself.

If the twist is really in the wood itself, it may be possible to heat-treat the neck, but personally I've never seen this work successfully in the long term. The only real remedy is to remove the fingerboard, plane the neck straight, and replace the fingerboard. Huge job, but better than junking the guitar if the twist is making it unplayable.

Hadn't thought of the truss rod as a possible culprit. Maybe you'll get lucky?

Barry · Post by **Barry** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 7:47 am

Yo, Rydawg! Haven't heard from you in awhile.

How's the project going?

Zup' with the twisty neck thingy?

Did you check out the truss rod?

Cheers