1960's Teisco TB-120 restoration

[Grin and Tonic]

I picked up a virtually unplayable Teisco bass a while back. The neck had about 3/16" of relief in it, buy hey there were was a truss rod that wasn't even engaged.

To fix the issue, I started turning the truss rod and immediately there was tons of improvement. I got out the calipers, and measured each turn- Turn...0.100" away...turn 0.85" away....turn...I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Then, one fateful turn of the nut almost all of the frictional opposition ceased, and the nut just spun freely. So did the entire rod for that matter. No bueno. With a little tug, the truss rod pulled right out of the neck.

To be continued...

 

[Grin and Tonic]

So, I snapped the truss rod (or so I thought), and needed to figure out a way to anchor the rod back in place. My thoughts were that there was some sort of nut holding the sheared rod in place, and that was buried somewhere in the neck. I have a friend who is a veterinarian , and she used her mad skills to take this radiograph for me:

The guitar says "steel reinforced neck," so that is presumably the two bars that run down the middle of the neck. At the bottom of the pic is a square metal nut, and you can see that there is a shadow of a shard of metal. I thought this was a portion of the truss rod, but as you will see, I was mistaken. In any case, this told me exactly where I needed to focus my efforts.

 

[Grin and Tonic]

Now it was time for surgery. I started by removing the frets and the nut:

Then came the fun part!

I used a razor saw to cut into the second fret slot, and down to the neck. I didn't want to remove the entire fingerboard, as I felt I probably would not be able to get it back in a precise-enough manner. There will be a saw kerf on each side of the binding that I will need to address later. In any case, the fingerboard came off with a little coaxing to reveal the "steel reinforced neck." That beam is aluminum!

 

[Jughead6]

Updates? Keen to see how you fix this.

 

[M.R. Ogle]

That is identical to my first bass.

 

[Grin and Tonic]

I ended up posting this on another forum, and didn't want to cross-post. Here is the link. Sorry to leave you hanging!

1960's Teisco - This got out of hand quick!