A fresh chapter to an old thread:
We recently rebuilt another Pedulla neck that had.....yep, you guessed it....a broken truss rod. This was an older bolt-on model 5-string, with a bird's eye maple fingerboard and a bright red headstock. An unusual look for a Pedulla! Anyway, it had the old-style special Pedulla truss rod with the small square tip that requires the special key. And it turns the "wrong" direction. And, as is quite common, the little square end got sheared off.
The owner looked around for several years, trying to find anyone who would repair it. Then he found this thread and contacted me. I agreed to take it in and do the rebuild.
I'm still very, very busy with my Scroll Basses and other things. But these days, I have another Luthier who works here in my shop. Jeremy Kirsch, known as Freekmagnet here on TalkBass. You can see his threads and work over in the Luthier's Corner section. Jeremy is very good at building custom necks from scratch, as well as his own crazy design basses. He's not an employee of mine. He runs his own independent business, and rents time and use of machines in my shop. But we trade jobs back and forth, and help each other on projects.
I passed most of this job to Jeremy, and guided him through it. I made up the new truss rod, but he did everything else. He routed off the old fingerboard, extracted the old truss rod, fitted in the new one, put on a new fingerboard, radiused and slotted it, new dots, new stainless frets.
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Here's the neck with the fingerboard routed off. That's the original Pedulla truss rod in the foreground. It popped out without any excessive violence. It's a single rod with left hand threads on one end and right hand threads on the other. It looks beefy, but it's a weak design. Poor mechanical ratio, not much neck-bending power. And the end of the rod was machined into a little square tip, which was easy to shear off.
This neck was fairly straight when it arrived here. No serious bowing problem. You can see that it has two steel reinforcing bars in it, and is quite stiff. The owner was trying to adjust the relief a little bit when the tip sheared off. The truss rod was underpowered for the job.
In the middle is the new truss rod that I made up. Over in Luthier's Corner, I have a thread going on where I'm showing everyone how to design and build their own truss rods for their own projects. This is the Double-Acting Double-Rod design that I'm working out. It's just right for this Pedulla neck, almost a drop-in fit. Jeremy only had to do a minor bit of trimming around the adjusting head to fit it in there. This rod is the 2nd prototype of that design, made to the correct length to fit in this neck.
This truss rod is much stronger and more powerful than the original rod. The adjusting head is stainless, taking a 5/32" Allen wrench. And it turns in the normal direction. Installed, it can easily bend the neck 0.100" back and 0.050" forward.
Jeremy machined the fingerboard to straight with the truss rod partially tightened. Good general practice.
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Putting in the side dots. He used black FRP plastic rod stock for the surface dots and the side dots.
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Jeremy sprayed 3 coats of clear polyurethane on the fingerboard before installing the frets and leveling them. Then one more coat after the frets were done, to get them all sealed up. Then buffed the finish off of the frets to their final polish. A maple fingerboard needs to be protected by a finish.
He found a really nice piece of bird's eye maple for the new fingerboard. It's a very close match to the original.
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And here's the finished neck. It's on its way back to its owner now. It should be good for many decades of bass fun.
It's interesting seeing a Pedulla with a blonde fingerboard and a bright red headstock. Most Pedullas are dark and woody. Pedullas are fine basses, and I'm happy to help repair them when they have problems.
For your reference, the total bill was $680, including the return shipping.
As I've said throughout this thread, I'm documenting these Scary Neck Repairs jobs to encourage other Luthiers to do these repairs. And to encourage Pedulla owners to get their basses repaired. It's not that difficult.
