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Basses w Maple FB's more stable than RW?

#21
I have a 71 P with a rosewood board, I have had to adjust the set up every ten or twenty years. I have gone to rehearsal, tuned up, played for two hours, taken it out in the cold, taken it home, taken it back out in the cold several days later, back to rehearsal and have had it still in tune.
 
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#22
vindibona1 said:
May I simply assume that the differences between these basses is that the rosewood and the maple necks, with or without mahogany are expanding and contracting at different rates than a solid maple neck/fingerboard?
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No.

You (like many, maybe even most people) are trying to simplify and generalize based on an extremely small sample size. The full story is that there are a large number of physical factors in play that are contributing to the difference you are experiencing. Each individual instrument is the sum of all of its component parts, tolerances, design, environment, etc. Additionally, wood is inherently non-homogenous, so no two pieces of the same species will share the exact same physical characteristics.

So sorry, generalizations are not applicable here.
 
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#23
One thing to consider. A maple neck (with integral maple fingerboard) is thicker than the maple neck with a rosewood board. I have no evidence to support one is stronger or less likely to twist than the other.
 
#24
I live with my wife and two children. Two of them have curly hair, while one has straight hair. The two with curly hair like spicy foods, but the one with straight hair doesn't.

Given that we all live in the same temperature controlled house, can I conclude that people with curly hair tend to like spicier food than people with straight hair?
 
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#25
I started playing bass in 1969 and I'm not the most careful person about babying my gear. I've been known to leave my bass (an Ibanez Musician (Japan)) out in the car in sub (0) weather OVER THE WEEKEND! It gave it a small crack in the finish but, no problem with the neck. I'm a lot more careful with my gear now that in my 70's but not at the level of obsession. If you give your basses reasonable care they should outlast you.
 
#27
You could commission someone to study otherwise identical necks, same glue, same truss, same number of frets with same depth grooves, same string tension, same mounting. Or better yet, mount to a steel bench so it doesn’t also swell and contract like a wood body. They could install strain gauges or use an optical coating. No other way to be sure it’s related to the fingerboard.

Also I have a solid 1pc rosewood neck and anecdotally it holds its tuning even when the weather changes are drastic.
 
#29
I just can't imagine having to make a truss rod adjustment before every weekly gig?! I mean, I have my basses setup by a luthier about once every 6 months (because I'm not much of a tech), but my necks (maple/maple, maple/rosewood, maple/ebony) don't move that much even in that time span, and I live in the midwest with crazy humidity and temp changes. If you genuinely do need to adjust them, there is something off with those necks. When I asked a tech years ago if I should only change one string at a time to avoid neck issues (I was a noob) he said "If your neck moves because of that, you have bigger issues".

Regarding 'acclimating' - I do notice that my basses need a few minutes in hand/on strap to warm up/acclimate when it's colder. If I plug in and tune right away, then do my 5-10 minutes of warm up, I'll need to retune before gig. If I just do my warm ups for 5 minutes, then tune, I'm set the rest of the night (and usually the tuning adjustments are very minor).
 
#31
Lots of opinions so I'll risk mine getting lost in a crowd..

First, well seasoned maple is very stable. My Westones have rosewood, about 4mm thick as fingerboard, laid onto maple. The stability matches that of graphite most of the time (I know this from being able to make direct comparisons whenever I want), and I live in a place where humidity varies wildly, often over the course of a single day.

When I bought my basses (old but rarely used, very clean) and refretted them the first thing I did was get the truss rod settled, and like you I like a low relief. I noticed that after adjusting, the relief was more like a circular arc, it takes a day or more to settle into a nice exponential curve from the tension of well-tuned strings. For this reason I will NOT change the truss rod, once it's behaving well. If I need to raise the saddles a bit I do that to avoid excessive buzz, and this pulls the string away from the neck, which in turn takes care of the tightening of the relief that caused the problem in the first place. I only need to do this by a 6th or 3rd of a turn, and only during seasonal changes when humidity average has changed enough to make a problem noticeable.

I have found two Westones to be extremely similar in this stability and ease of maintenance.

As to plywood, the cross-grain of it is supposed to strengthen it, not really to increase stability. Anyone who has stored it in large sheets for long enough knows they need to hold it with enough pressure to keep it flat. It WILL warp, if not restrained. Well seasoned solid wood will keep its shape much better.
 
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#33
Ampslut said:
I started playing bass in 1969 and I'm not the most careful person about babying my gear. I've been known to leave my bass (an Ibanez Musician (Japan)) out in the car in sub (0) weather OVER THE WEEKEND! It gave it a small crack in the finish but, no problem with the neck. I'm a lot more careful with my gear now that in my 70's but not at the level of obsession. If you give your basses reasonable care they should outlast you.
Click to expand...
Unlike some, I am very careful with my gear. As a retired semi-pro trumpet player my main horns are a 1973 Bb and a 1981 C. You wouldn't know that they weren't made last year, though they were played daily for many years and gigged regularly. I care for my guitars and basses the same way, though I have purchased a few scratch-n-dent models which makes me worry about them less.

I'm just perplexed that my basses with RW fingerboards often need to be adjusted an hour or so after going from home to a gig. Again, I keep very tight tolerances and can feel the smallest change. I think, on average, the neck relief measures .007"-.009". Any higher and the feel is obvious. Any lower induces string buzz. At this moment, having just rechecked, the Yamaha's relief is .006", the Ibanez BTB675 and the Fender Jazz5 is measuring .007".

Perhaps I've got the setup closer than the "recommended" neck relief and string height, which might make small changes much more noticeable. At least based on the Fender model. With a 9.5" radius the relief is recommended at .012" and I'm almost half of that. String height is recommended at 6/64ths and for the most part I'm at 4/64th" on all my basses. [see chart below]

So it appears that my setup tolerances are quite a bit tighter than the "recommended" setup settings. And so it might be just that the most minute changes in environment would be felt and heard. And perhaps my Ibanez w/maple might be a bit more stable for a lot of reasons.

One other thing that I hadn't thought of was that I hadn't "conditioned" the RW fingerboards for some time, perhaps a while before 2020 Covid. Just yesterday and today I went after the FB's on my Epiphone Dot and Taylor 814ceDLX. The Epi was very dry and had a lighter color. The Taylor seemed in better shape, but after conditioning I knew it sucked up some of the Dunlop conditioner as the Taylor ebony "striping" became more even in color. I dunno.

Thoughts/

upload_2022-11-16_9-10-16.png
 
#37
tpaul said:
I live with my wife and two children. Two of them have curly hair, while one has straight hair. The two with curly hair like spicy foods, but the one with straight hair doesn't.

Given that we all live in the same temperature controlled house, can I conclude that people with curly hair tend to like spicier food than people with straight hair?
Click to expand...
That all depends on if the children were adopted, duh.
 
#39
Only 48 years and over 50 basses here (look at my profile for breakdown). I now only play 1 piece maple necks. My FCS neck has been adjusted once in 14 years, my 3 year old Musikraft 1 piece roasted maple has never been adjusted other than initial setup. Others which have proven to be stabile (Dingwall, Roscoe, other 1 piece maple neck mutts, and 1 wenge neck) are backups or sometimes used. I can live with a 1 change a year neck, but prefer not to.
 
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