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Posted (edited)

Hello Pg's

I have an acoustic that my luthier friend help me build. It has a crack and it is on a five piece neck right in the middle of a thin strip of walnut. the crack runs parallel with the stripe around the first fret. There is no telling how deep the crack is. It has been like this for a year and 8 months while being taken care in its case with a humidifier. The crack runs about 13 cm's.

Is it better to make a whole new neck or should we epoxy the crack? My builder friend and I are pretty sure that it was a fluke of a weak piece of walnut. The trussrod is rather large and a little too deep for the neck profile... But its a five piece neck! In the meantime, we loosened the tension of the truss rod and the bulging crack has flattened, but of course is still present.

If anyone could help with suggestions it would be great. I miss my guitar and the luthier is of course very nervous. were just trying to take the right course of action.

Cheers,

Nathan.

* I did look at the front page in the repair section and I am not convinced that tutorial should be applied.

Edited by riffster
Posted

i couldnt think of anything that would fix that w/o looking horrible; ie fake skunk stripe; or graf of somekind; a new neck would prolly be the best way to go for the sake of a complete remedy; but working thin epoxy into the crack and refinishing it would keep it stable for any kind of playing and surely prevent further splitting; being that the wood isnt totally crap and detireiating on you!

Posted

That sounds like the neck is too thin under the truss rod. Especially since it is in the middle laminate (which is the one that has the truss rod in it), and that it closes up some when the pressure was taken off the truss rod. The five piece neck will help making the neck more resistant to twisting and flexing. But the middle piece with a deep channel cut in it is still going to be the weakest link. The surrounding laminates are not going to provide any extra strength to stop the truss rod from splitting through. And you said yourself that the truss rod is a little too deep for the thickness of the neck. That sounds to be the cause to me. If that is the case, your only choice is a new neck. Repairing it with glue would only be a temporary fix, and it would split again in the future.

Posted

Thanks for analyzing the problem and providing a clear solution. In the back of my mind I figured a new neck would be the solution. The way you put the problem made a lot of sense. Thanks again.

Posted

Id try tightening the rod to open the crack, apply some CA glue then loosen the rod to close the crack. like some one said above sounds like a lack of wood behind the rod. it could be doomed no matter what you do.

Posted

I sure hope I am not doomed, but I won't' be surprised. For now, we are going to apply epoxy. the crack was also kind of a raised blister. When I noticed the crack and took it over to the guys house, we loosened the rod. After a period of time the bump disappeared. Since then, the crack has not gotten larger. By this observation, we have determined that the pressure has obviously been minimized and is most likely at the level it should be (or at least at a better level).. Action raised a little on the guitar, but we are going to compensate by sanding down the bridge a bit, maybe a 64th of an inch because with the decrease in tension from loosening the rod, we do not want excess buzzes. That would not sound pleasing at all.

We are doing this first. If this does not work, then we will have to resort to building a new neck. Our way is, don't do more work if you don't have to. I'm crossing my fingers.

  • 3 months later...
Posted

Update

Well, we went to fix the neck by drilling a small hole in the neck and then filling it with epoxy. We could not get that far. My friend who helped me build it forgot that he used a larger truss rod and the rod was up against the bottom of the neck. Kind of like when a broken bone is close to breaking out of the skin. We are making a new neck now. I should be playing on it sometime this summer since he has other projects. The electric that were building will also be done this summer.

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