Palm Bay Restoration, Need Some Advice!

[andychaos]

Hey guys,

I'm restoring a beautiful palm bay "tidalwave" guitar back into its original glory.

So far so good! However, I am having some trouble with the action..

In order to make all the notes work i have to raise the trem right up high, making the action very very high indeed. and the notes STILL buzz slightly when the frets are pressed down.

To counter this i shimmed the nut up quite a bit, which helped some but not quite enough... I have just today sanded down all the frets slightly... Still to no avail!

It seems the neck is just slightly too close to the strings all the way down, I think the neck is bowing the way it should (very very slightly) so i dont think the truss rod is the problem.

Any help would be much appreciated!!

[daveq]

There's a great setup guide over on jemsite.com - give that a look. If the strings buzz with open strings, the nut may have needed to be raised but the truss rod could also have been the issue. Sometimes people forget that the nut height only affects open strings - just wanted to give a reminder just in case.

Do you have a notched straight edge? I have found those to be extremely helpful when doing this type of work. If you don't know for sure if your neck is straight (or has that slight forward bow), it's difficult to know what needs to be done.

The guide over on jemsite would be the first thing to try - it's got some great info.

[andychaos]

Thanks for the advice, that page was useful!

I was comparing the palm bay to my ibanez jem and i THINK i need to take the fingerboard off and make it thinner somehow..

The reason is that i have the nut shimmed VERY high in order to get a cleaner open string sound.. and i've noticed the fingerboard is thicker than perhaps the nut is designed to work with, also the higher frets just look too high up when looked at besides the bridge.

What do you guys think?

[Guitarfrenzy]

Thanks for the advice, that page was useful!

I was comparing the palm bay to my ibanez jem and i THINK i need to take the fingerboard off and make it thinner somehow..

The reason is that i have the nut shimmed VERY high in order to get a cleaner open string sound.. and i've noticed the fingerboard is thicker than perhaps the nut is designed to work with, also the higher frets just look too high up when looked at besides the bridge.

What do you guys think?

←

First off, if you was making the fretboard thinner, you wouldn't have to take it off, what you would do is pull all the frets, then sand it with sandpaper attached to the correct radius sanding block, the longer the better, I use a self made 18" long wooden one nowdays myself. But, that's probably not what the problem is in your case, since everything is relative to the fingerboard anyway. Daveq is correct about the open strings are the only ones affected by the nut setup. If you hear a buzz or dead sound on any open string this is your problem, of course that's if the bridge is high enough and setup properly to begin with. What I think your problem is that you need to shim a little at the front of the neck pocket so that it will raise the neck upward so that you don't run out of bridge height with it's adjustments. That's what I'd try first. I could go through the whole list of procedures, but then again it's all over the internet. Hope this helps.