A great old regular customer who owns a pile of old Epiphone basses, one that had a neck with a Lot of old repairs, had been eying my new old stock factory original Epi neck hanging on the wall for a while and decided to go for it.
"No problem, that old neck is barely hanging on and may come off during the drive over if you go too fast down my road since the hurricane & flood..."
The suspect:
I ran a magnet over the heel and it had a lot of pull, so I suspected possibly a bit of metal from the old repairs. I steamed the neck for three hours(!!!!!!!) and it would not budge, but there were no signs of epoxy. The fingerboard had plugs, so I rooted around in them and found this:
It looked like it broke off a long time ago during the original install:
And this:
With the fingerboard off:
After two more hours of nothing positive achieved, I went to level 2. I started with a brand new blade and all that metal completely trashed it:
Then I found this:
And this:
And more of this:
With all of that plus another dozen screws in the button area, once I cleaned up the mortise, the original replacement neck geometry was not even close to fitting....So I'm now stuck with a neckless bass body. I occasionally make new three piece necks with a center beam like this original one and scroll graft to those, but it is a lot of work and VERY tricky to do clean. I decided to take the NOS Epi neck with no center beam, chopped off the scroll, found some nice old Tennessee maple that I have been using for domestic necks, made up a whole new neck and did a very clean scroll graft, appropriate for the roadworn body:
The two fit excellent now and are very tidy:
The two combined were a beautiful candidate for a removable neck bass, but the owner did not want one, so the new mortise and tenon neck joint got glued in with hot hide glue and is rock solid. That was a LOT of work for something that I originally thought would be an easy neck swap and a very common example of what goes on behind the scenes when you take your bass to the shop anticipating something simple...
'Hope all of you have a safe and uneventful holiday!
"No problem, that old neck is barely hanging on and may come off during the drive over if you go too fast down my road since the hurricane & flood..."
The suspect:
I ran a magnet over the heel and it had a lot of pull, so I suspected possibly a bit of metal from the old repairs. I steamed the neck for three hours(!!!!!!!) and it would not budge, but there were no signs of epoxy. The fingerboard had plugs, so I rooted around in them and found this:
It looked like it broke off a long time ago during the original install:
And this:
With the fingerboard off:
After two more hours of nothing positive achieved, I went to level 2. I started with a brand new blade and all that metal completely trashed it:
Then I found this:
And this:
And more of this:
With all of that plus another dozen screws in the button area, once I cleaned up the mortise, the original replacement neck geometry was not even close to fitting....So I'm now stuck with a neckless bass body. I occasionally make new three piece necks with a center beam like this original one and scroll graft to those, but it is a lot of work and VERY tricky to do clean. I decided to take the NOS Epi neck with no center beam, chopped off the scroll, found some nice old Tennessee maple that I have been using for domestic necks, made up a whole new neck and did a very clean scroll graft, appropriate for the roadworn body:
The two fit excellent now and are very tidy:
The two combined were a beautiful candidate for a removable neck bass, but the owner did not want one, so the new mortise and tenon neck joint got glued in with hot hide glue and is rock solid. That was a LOT of work for something that I originally thought would be an easy neck swap and a very common example of what goes on behind the scenes when you take your bass to the shop anticipating something simple...
'Hope all of you have a safe and uneventful holiday!
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Or is it going into a wood stove?
