OK so a while ago, a friend of mine found an old japanese Maranthon guitar in his basement. It didn't work at all, so he gave it to me to mess with and keep. I did some rewiring and replaced the tuners, as they didn't work at all. Now, the neck had always had some problems. I believe it is mahogany (it feels like it anyway) and it has a rosewood fretboard. It seemed to have a rather sharp bend around the 14th fret. I had also tightened up the truss rod as much as I could (over a period of a few days of course) and the bend was still there and the neck was still bowing down in the middle. One day, the truss rod just sheared off right at the bolt from stress. Since I didn't really have much to lose and had a good deal of carpentry experience, I decided to remove the fret board. I followed the tutorial on project guitar which i must say was a great tutorial. The fretboard came off with no problems. Now, I expected to find the niche there with the truss rod sitting in it. Not so. There are three slots, with one in the center being about .2 inches in width and the other two being about .1 inches in width. Also, they are all covered with very thin pieces of wood, excepting anywhere in the range of about an inch to 1/4 of an inch on either end. The open area, however, is fairly covered or filled with the glue to glue down the fretboard. There definitely is a truss rod in the center one, however I can't get into the side ones very well to tell.
Has anyone ever heard or seen something like this? Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks alot
Wolfgang