Hard2Hear said:
I wonder what makes them twist then. I had a Jazz bass neck twist on me. I had slacked the strings and put it away. It was in the room I keep everything else in, temperature and humidity controlled. But it got a bad twist anyways over a couple years time. this particular one was a mim, so maybe it just wasn't very good to begin with. But then again, I have one of the first year mim strats and the neck is perfect on it and its never had tension off of it. Who knows...its a crapshoot as far as I'm concerned. I just give them the best environment I can and hope theyre ok.
H2H
Well, you are comparing apples to oranges (if I may be allowed the ungodly cliché). Bass necks and guitar necks have completely different issues involved. The added length and narrow width of bass necks make them much more unstable.
But what causes twists is a pretty simple thing. As the sign in our shop says:
Carefully selected pieces of wood, in the most carefully controlled environments will do pretty much as they damn well please.
The problem is that different areas of the tree, even within a few centimeters of one another, will be under drastically different amounts of tension coming from completely different directions. This is not always (or even usually) visible, but as the wood is shaped, these tensions are relieved, and this of course affects the tension on the surrounding areas of the piece. Some times they will develop major twists in seconds, but more often, they move slowly, and over time they change.
Add to this that the wood used in most factories has had a very limited amount of time to cure, and you exacerbate the problem. They do, of course, dry their wood (in large kilns), but that is only part of the equation. Once a piece of wood is dry, it must also acclimatize to the new moisture content. The areas between the wood fibers (the tree's cells) loose moisture much faster than the cells themselves, but a moisture content measurement gives you an overall average moisture content. As the moisture content equalizes through the piece, the variable sizes of the cells and spaces between them can change, which causes twisting, warping, cupping, and bowing. The way to deal with this is simple, but not practical in a factory situation. You let the wood air dry (which leads to a more consistent internal moisture content as the wood dries much slower), and you let it sit in it's final manufacturing climate for as long as possible before you use it. We let our tops for acoustic guitars hang out in the shop for a MINIMUM of 5 years before we use them. Our neck wood that we are using right now is probably at least 5, and maybe 10 years old. We have a few really nice old German Spruce (the kind you can't get anymore) and Brazilian Rosewood (which is also impossible to get anymore, for all practical purposes) from at least 25 years ago, maybe even a few from as much
as 35 years ago. Not that we will use that for any but the most expensive guitars. Backs and sides are less of a concern for us, and if we must we will use them after only a few months. We do try, however, to let them sit for a few years. With my electrics, I want the neck blanks to sit for as long as possible, at least a year, and longer is better. Needless to say, this kind of storage for the amounts of wood needed for Martin or Taylor, would be more than a little cost prohibitive, and the problem is even worse for factories in 2nd and 3rd world countries, where the level of concern for these problems is nearly non-existent (they just want to build as many of the damn things as possible, as quickly as possible).
Unless of course you WANT to spend $3000 for a D15, but I am guessing not.
But industrial space is expensive. I mean, the folks at Martin have severely reduced the amount of factory space used by the repair department because it is cheaper for them to have local repair shops do the work. They told me it costs them - including wages and shop space which they can't use for manufacturing - almost $200 an hour to do repair work in the factory. I can do it much cheaper.
Light
"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
