Neck relief?

[noisedude]

Maybe they should, but you know they don't all do so. I always tell people to expect that a new guitar is going to need a setup when they buy it. Factory setups are a joke, and a store which is moving a lot of volume just doesn't have the time or ability to (much less the staff) to do a lot of work to them all. Add to that the importance of playing style to the setup, and I don't have a problem with stores not doing that work (but then, I make a lot of money from stores who don't setup guitars for their customers).

Totally. We make a lot of income that way too!

Taylors current neck system is an industrial wonder of the world. They've always had bolt on necks, but about five years ago or so, they went to a new neck which is set in to the body a bit, and which not only bolts on the neck, but also the fingerboard extension. Their web site probably has a thing on the NT neck (New Technology, which it isn't by the way, it was originally done by a guy back around 1900 whose name I can't remember). It's kind of cool. You can do a complete neck reset in about 15-20 minutes. They say faster on the DVD they sent us, but their kind of selling the product there. They even have shims all made up for the reset. It does kind of fuck up their cutaways, but they were fucked up already anyway (though still better than Lariveé’s cutaway).


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

Cheers man, appreciate the info. Good to know that the technology is being moved along too ... even if it's only slowly.

 

[ermghoti]

It's (always) at the last fret. If you did that on a Martin, for instance, it would be very misleading. The first fret and, really, the fret where the neck starts to get thicker going into the body. On most acoustics, that is about 10-12th fret. On a strat it is about the 15-16th fret. Once the neck starts getting thicker, or goes into the body, the truss rod doesn't work very well, so it can give you a bad reading.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

Good to know, and I have usually used the 14th fret by default, but I assumed any fall-away would cause the high point in the upper frets to fret out the string, and the last fret would therefore work well enough as a rule of thumb.

After more thought, if the neck is doing something fishy above the point where the truss rod stops working so well, wouldn't you need to know that before a setup? For instance, if there were an exaggerated forward bow region from the body joint to the last fret?

 

[MadTiger3000]

Fret at the first fret and about the body fret. There should be ABOUT a playing cards thickness of relief (and no, I don't know what the measurement should be, as I've never measured it. We've always done it by eye).


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

Playing card? Oh, 0.33mm should do as an estimate.

 

[cellardweller]

I didn't have time to change strings, but I did notice there is actually buzz more evenly distributed than I had initially noticed.
It is not as noticable in frets 1-12, but it is there. It is more evident on strings 7th/B through 4th/D....

Any short term recommendations?
I'd hate to ship it off to California to Schecter....

 

[ausrock]

You may find the article at the following link interesting but remember, it is just the opinion of one luthier, others may have differing views.

http://patrickeggleguitars.org/smf/index.php/topic,78.0.html


Also, as is mentioned in this article, changing string gauges will throw any neck settings out. As a rough guide, jumping from a set of 9's to 10's or 10's to 11's will add something like an additional 7 kgs of stress to the neck.......again, this figure is approximate as there are numerous factors involved but it is something a lot of people fail to consider.

 

[travelin travis]

The operative word in your post noisy is "good".
Unfortunately, there is nothing which fits that description within 30 miles of here.

Here's how it usually goes

1. drop off item to be repaired/obtain approx time frame
2. call back at time given, "item is with guitar tech, but he's backlogged".
3. wait another 2 weeks
4. go back to store
5. find item in same place I put it
6. Two months pass/finally repairs complete!
7. Receive item back in same condition as before

Sadly, I don't think the guy is really incompetent, just lazy!
Last time I ended up waiting for the daywhen he was in, taking my guitar back, and walking him through the setup I needed.
He tends to avoid me now.

That's pretty similar to my experience with guitar techs also. The only tech I could find that did a good job, well he just did'nt listen to a damn thing I said. Wrong guage and brand of strings, action alot lower than I like it, etc. This is why I started doing all my own adjustments. It's pretty frustrating to repeatedly pay for a service and never get what you paid for.