huge problem , or not?

[lucindrea]

ok i'm redoing an old guitar i got a few years back .. one of those $5 garage sale ones ( no one on several forums knows what it is either , if your curious , check out http://www.lucindrea.com/guitar/what.html ) so after removing the acrylic paint , it turns out their is a decent wood grained body ...

my problem is in the neck ... it's bowed , backwards .. in other words , with the truss as loose as it goes , placing the neck on a flat surface , frets down , their is space under the first 3 frets and also the 20th and 21st ... this isnt a matter of leveling frets as far as i can tell ... putting a stright edge allong the seam of the neck and the fretboard i can see the bend , it's slight , re-leveling the frets MIGHT work once it's stringed..

so my question is , how hard is this to fix .. can i pull off the fret board , sand the neck flat and re-do the board ... or am i better off just going and getting a replacement neck? ... i've never re-freted a neck so it would be an adventure for me ( although probly a good learnign exp ) and i really dont want to spend more on tools to do it then a new neck would cost.

[feylya]

http://www.projectguitar.com/tut/warped.htm

And this isn't really the right section of the forum to post this in.

[soapbarstrat]

You should be putting the straight-edge on the fret-board surface with the guitar strung to pitch, then see what's going on. But what kind of "straight-edge". When I say straight-edge for checking neck-bow, I mean an expensive precision ground one, not just a big piece of metal, or ruler, although some of those might be close enough, but some are not really straight enough for this kind of procedure.

That tutorial is a "last resort". Often you can re-shape the fret-board surface to get it worked out in the end. Slim chance it will go perfectly without experience and proper tools.

Turning the neck up-side-down and using the table surface as a "straight-edge". Not a good idea. That table top might have a little bow in it.

[lucindrea]

http://www.projectguitar.com/tut/warped.htm

And this isn't really the right section of the forum to post this in.

acctully i had about 3 windows open and i posted in the wrong one .. sorry aout that ..

as for using the table to check ... it was just a quick check ( losts of buzzin on that neck and i figured i would look into it while i have it apart ) .. and when you get the same result on a table top , a pice of slate , and the top of a table saw , it's a good bet that the neck is the problem and not the table :-) ... i'll explore all my options before looking to that tutorial .