@bobyoung53 .
Well, nothing "mythical" about the headstock break I witnessed in person, it broke exactly where you see a Gibson break, either side of the TRC, leaving a thin little bridge of wood either side. It's undeniably bad basic carpentry, any furniture maker or framer can tell you that, yet somehow Gibson and Ric keep doing it. Sometimes bad design just gets "baked in" to a brand by customer expectation. That's not limited to Ric and Gibson, or course. Ric finally realized that using a "swimming pool" pup route 1/2" away from the neck heel was a bad idea when necks started developing " negative neck angle", literally the neck beam folding at that point. The mystery is why it took them so long to realize this was just basic Bad Design 101. I deliberately fixed both of those two inherent design flaws in my own Ric clone builds, it's stupid easy and basic common sense. As to the utility of two rods, either Ric has discovered some magical Special Sauce that virtually every other major builder somehow overlooked, or its just a marketing ploy that people like the sound of, but most people rarely or never actually use. The most common scenario among guitar techs is finding one rod tight and the other loose, doing nothing, so they adjust them to equal tightness. It makes sense on a 6 string where the width of the neck increases the likelihood of twist, but virtually the entire industry has decided a single DA rod makes more sense.
