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Necks without truss rods
- Thread starter ardgedee
- Start date
Turnaround
Commercial User
- May 6, 2004
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- Disclosures
- Independent Instrument Technician - Retired
That's not actually true. What Ric says is "you may prefer to adjust a RIC neck almost dead straight depending on the playing action preferred". This commonly has been misconstrued as meaning that Rics don't need any relief. The reason this belief is so common is likely because Rickenbacker prefaced it by saying "A slight under bow (relief) is common on non-Rickenbacker instruments due to their limited range of adjustment". However, most instruments with adjustable truss rods offer just as much range of adjustment as Rickenbacker and can be adjusted from backbow to dead flat to forward bow.
To quote another highly regarded bass maker about adjusting the neck on his bases, he recommends that the neck be adjusted "flat, with just a little relief". That's just about as meaningful as "almost dead straight".
And for that matter, any decent bass with a working truss rod and proper fret levelling can play with very little and even no relief at all. There's nothing special about the Ric that makes it different in that regard.
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"Every one of the '80s pioneers of carbon fiber use adjustable truss rods in their current products, and there are probably good reasons why."
I suspect that customers wanted adjustable relief. Also, an extremely stiff neck would sound different, perhaps not in a good way.
I suspect that customers wanted adjustable relief. Also, an extremely stiff neck would sound different, perhaps not in a good way.
^^ This... right here. This is the correct answer.
There is literally no reason under normal circumstances to build a neck with no means to adjust it. None.
Can it be done? Yes.
How would it be done? If you want it to be easily repeatable, you would need to use consistent man-made materials that have little to no deviation in strength, etc. In other words, you're not going to do this consistently with only wood. It's going to require composites.
Truss rods purchased in bulk are only a few dollars a pop. It wouldn't make sense to not use one.
But hey, that's just one guy's opinion.
If all no-truss-rod basses had about .008-.010” relief in the neck that never changed with weather or string gauge change, I could live with that. I’ve certainly never owned a bass like that.
My ‘52 Kay upright doesn’t have a truss rod and I don’t think its neck relief changes much at all, but the action certainly changes a lot with humidity. I think that’s 95% top / body change.
My ‘52 Kay upright doesn’t have a truss rod and I don’t think its neck relief changes much at all, but the action certainly changes a lot with humidity. I think that’s 95% top / body change.
I think the first question you’d want to ask yourself is what are the advantages of not having a truss rod?
I don’t see very many.
I suspect if builders could have avoided the effort and expense of installing truss rods (and not run into problems down the road) they would have eliminated them decades ago.
I don’t see very many.
I suspect if builders could have avoided the effort and expense of installing truss rods (and not run into problems down the road) they would have eliminated them decades ago.
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Original Danelectro basses were built without a truss rod and even 70 years after you'd be hard pressed finding a faulty one.
The building process including reinforcements was detailed in the book Neptune Bound dedicated to the story of Danelectro.
The building process including reinforcements was detailed in the book Neptune Bound dedicated to the story of Danelectro.
Technically, the Bunker tension-free system is not a truss rod...it smacks more of an unyielding (almost) steel reinforcement bar.
Riis
Riis
I've had 3 Kramer Lumies (aluminum necks) and built 3 other instruments without truss rods - one was a solid steel bar in the middle of the neck, one was a wood core neck with a fibreglas exoskeleton, and the third was a solid fibreglas neck.
A neck that is so stiff that it never needs adjusting and is always well setup, regardless of what gauge strings you throw on it, is huge. Living in an area where humidity changes a lot, fighting moving necks is something I'd rather avoid.
The second advantage of those kind of necks (especially on the Kramers) is they have incredibly long sustain - for some genres, that is very useful.
And (third) you also don't have any hint of the traditional G string dead spot - that is also very helpful.
A multi lam neck can help in adding stability to a neck, especially if you pay close attention to grain direction, but despite common "wisdom", it doesn't make the neck any stiffer.
It's just a hunch, but I think if you had lots of thin laminates stuck together with epoxy it would be stiffer then one piece of the same material
You have precisely stated the common misconception. The stiffness is in the fibers, not the glue.
Think about holding a couple of long strips of veneer in your hand. Pretty floppy huh? Now glue them together with epoxy. Stiffer?
Wood is fibers glued together with natural glue. Whether the glue is manmade or natural makes very little difference to the stiffness, but the thickness definitely does. The stiffness of a beam is proportional to its thickness cubed.
So, yes, gluing together two strips of veneer makes the stiffness in the vertical plane go up by a factor of 8, but it does that by doubling the thickness. A strip of veneer that is twice as thick to start with (where the glue is all the natural stuff) is also 8x stiffer than the thin one.
You should be comparing a block of wood with an equally sized block of glued veneers. What the veneers are like individually is irrelevant.
That was the thought-process behind the Kubicki Ex-Factor 37 lam neck: provide the desired stiffness while maintaining the desired resonance in a quasi-headless platform. As a previous owner, I can neither confirm nor deny these claims. Is there a point of diminishing return: 3 vs 5 vs 7 vs 9 laminates?
Riis
My example was poor, but this is the bit that I question. It's widely known that modern glues are stronger than the wood itself, so by adding many glue lines to the structure should increase the overall strength & stiffness.
Like @Zooberwerx says, it's already been done to the point of diminishing returns. On the upside, 1/8" maple and oak laminate can be had for fairly cheap if you shop around, so an experiment wouldn't cost much more than a run of the mill maple neck -- aside from glue and your time.I can feel some testing coming on!
My guess is that like @micguy says, the gain is primarily stability -- whatever inclination the wood has to twist or warp can be dealt with because every individual sheet is so thin. You could hypothetically build a good, stable neck from wood that would otherwise be structurally unusable, as long as it had been cut as laminate rather than dimensional lumber.
What might be more productive is building a relatively conventional multipart neck, but using sheets of carbon fiber for stringers instead of an exotic wood laminate. The shaping process might be unpleasant though.