I don't know about you, but whenever I have to remove the neck or pickguard from an instrument just to adjust the trussrod, I worry that the instrument's designer may have been an idiot.
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Taking off the neck to adjust truss rod...
- Thread starter nonohmic
- Start date
I don't know about you, but whenever I have to remove the neck or pickguard from an instrument just to adjust the trussrod, I worry that the instrument's designer may have been an idiot.
i may make 'fine' adjustments from one day/week to the next on some instruments in some playing environments so: i like the headstock access and have avoided those instruments which adjust at the heel. but i wouldn't hesitate to buy/play an instrument with a heel truss adjustment if everything else was in order regarding the feel.
exactly!
Leo got some of it right the first (or second, or third) time. My basses now have heel adjusts, access trenches in the body, and no pickguards. Having to take off the neck or pickguard just invites stripped threads eventually, which I find.....silly.
On your car, they put the nut you use to drain the oil on the bottom of the car, not behind a cover, and you don't have to unbolt the engine to change oil. Anything you might do on a fairly regular basis should be accessible.
That’s just a fundamentally stupid design, a heel wheel adjuster has the same purpose and works with any tool you can poke into it. I like a concealed headstock TRC, or a Fender bullet adjuster better aesthetically. There just isn’t any good rationale for having to remove the neck to adjust a trussrod.
Here’s the rationale, IT WAS PRACTICALLY A NEW INVENTION IN THE EARLY FIFTIES. The main consideration was to mass produce instruments with semi skilled labor. The initial product was so much better than anything else available, that it was put into production as is. From a production standpoint, without the benefit of earlier examples, machining the necks that way worked. It was a shoestring company that couldn’t even employ people year round. Development was stunted while chasing sales. Then Leo got sick and sold. He made enough money to start again and start refining as pressures to move product NOW were not as high.
Leo made modern music possible. Slicing a legend apart is pretty easy with 20/20 hindsight. Set aside your experience of the last five decades of benefits of development before calling it stupid.
But I’m sure you are all flawless.
Leo made modern music possible. Slicing a legend apart is pretty easy with 20/20 hindsight. Set aside your experience of the last five decades of benefits of development before calling it stupid.
But I’m sure you are all flawless.
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Contrarian viewpoint: Leo got it right the first time. Seventy odd years later peoples opinions changed.
The rationale behind locating the adjustment at the body was simple. Ever see a broken headstock on a Fender Strat? Or a Precision Bass? They're pretty rare. There are two reasons why. The first is that the adjustment is at the heel of the neck. The second is the shape of the peg head. To have the convenience of adjusting the truss rod at the headstock requires plowing out a lot of wood. That makes that area weak. With the adjustment at the heel the wood at the headstock stays where it belongs.
Here's another blast from the past: Seventy years ago bass players were switching from the double bass to the electric bass guitar. What they considered to be slick action is regarded as ridiculous today. When I first starting doing repair work the old guys coming to the shop would tell me not to lower the strings too much. Eight sixty fourths at the twelfth fret was considered low. These guys weren't worried about too much relief. They were worried about too much clank. They were used to pulling hard.
By the way, these guys hated what is considered a typical factory set up today, namely 6/64ths and 5/64ths bass and treble sides respectively. They thought that ridiculously low. Most players think today think that is ridiculously high.
History is a cruel mistress.
It wasn't just the bass players who eschewed low string heights. Guitar players were playing string sets gauged from eleven to thirteen and heavier. If a guitarist wanted a lighter set he had to make it up himself or have a music store do for him. They would use banjo strings for the E and B. Until Ernie Ball starting packaging Slinkys in the sixties there was no such thing as a set of nines.
History is on Leo's side. Complaining about a minor inconvenience with regard to the era in which the product was developed is a bit disingenuous. It's kind of like complaining about having to walk across the room to change the channel on a television before the invention of the remote control. Or having a phone that doesn't allow for video.
If this produces anxiety take your guitar to a pro. They're nice people and can use the work.
Respectfully submitted.
N.B. Minor inconvenience: In the shop time is money. We did a time study after listening to much whining from an apprentice. It takes about two minutes to loosen, tilt, adjust, reverse, try, loosen, tilt, adjust, reverse, try and be done. If it takes more than three tries or so (five minutes) there's something else going on that is going to take some time to correct. Is two to five minutes that hard to find?
The rationale behind locating the adjustment at the body was simple. Ever see a broken headstock on a Fender Strat? Or a Precision Bass? They're pretty rare. There are two reasons why. The first is that the adjustment is at the heel of the neck. The second is the shape of the peg head. To have the convenience of adjusting the truss rod at the headstock requires plowing out a lot of wood. That makes that area weak. With the adjustment at the heel the wood at the headstock stays where it belongs.
Here's another blast from the past: Seventy years ago bass players were switching from the double bass to the electric bass guitar. What they considered to be slick action is regarded as ridiculous today. When I first starting doing repair work the old guys coming to the shop would tell me not to lower the strings too much. Eight sixty fourths at the twelfth fret was considered low. These guys weren't worried about too much relief. They were worried about too much clank. They were used to pulling hard.
By the way, these guys hated what is considered a typical factory set up today, namely 6/64ths and 5/64ths bass and treble sides respectively. They thought that ridiculously low. Most players think today think that is ridiculously high.
History is a cruel mistress.
It wasn't just the bass players who eschewed low string heights. Guitar players were playing string sets gauged from eleven to thirteen and heavier. If a guitarist wanted a lighter set he had to make it up himself or have a music store do for him. They would use banjo strings for the E and B. Until Ernie Ball starting packaging Slinkys in the sixties there was no such thing as a set of nines.
History is on Leo's side. Complaining about a minor inconvenience with regard to the era in which the product was developed is a bit disingenuous. It's kind of like complaining about having to walk across the room to change the channel on a television before the invention of the remote control. Or having a phone that doesn't allow for video.
If this produces anxiety take your guitar to a pro. They're nice people and can use the work.
Respectfully submitted.
N.B. Minor inconvenience: In the shop time is money. We did a time study after listening to much whining from an apprentice. It takes about two minutes to loosen, tilt, adjust, reverse, try, loosen, tilt, adjust, reverse, try and be done. If it takes more than three tries or so (five minutes) there's something else going on that is going to take some time to correct. Is two to five minutes that hard to find?
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Here’s the rationale, IT WAS PRACTICALLY A NEW INVENTION IN THE EARLY FIFTIES. The main consideration was to mass produce instruments with semi skilled labor. The initial product was so much better than anything else available, that it was put into production as is. From a production standpoint, without the benefit of earlier examples, machining the necks that way worked. It was a shoestring company that couldn’t even employ people year round. Development was stunted while chasing sales. Then Leo got sick and sold. He made enough money to start again and start refining as pressures to move product NOW were not as high.
Leo made modern music possible. Slicing a legend apart is pretty easy with 20/20 hindsight. Set aside your experience of the last five decades of benefits of development before calling it stupid.
But I’m sure you are all flawless.
Nailed it...
So the moral of the story is, if you want something like a Fender, only better, buy a G&L.
Yeah. What he said... Personally, it's never taken me more than a couple of minutes to make a truss rod adjustment on this kind of bass - and I have several of them. And, unless I make pretty drastic string changes on one of them, truss rod adjustments are few and far between in my house...
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Yes, I completely agree. Way back when Fender basses were first introduced, the truss rod was rarely even touched in the life of the instrument. Everyone ran the action much higher, with a moderate amount of relief. Because they plucked harder. The truss rod was only adjusted if the instrument went through a dramatic climate change.
And everything about the detail design of Fender's instruments was about making them as cheap as possible to manufacture by the millions in factories. And he succeeded in bringing his electric guitars and basses to the masses. Fenders became the Standard, the Baseline. At MusicMan, Leo worked to upgrade the Standard to go along with how the music was changing, and how basses were being used and played. A different sound and playing technique. At G & L, he established the Boutique bass; a Standard pattern bass, with a lot of detail refinements in its construction that made it better, but limited it to smaller shop production and higher prices.
Leo was primarily an Engineer. He developed products to fit markets, balancing function, ease of manufacturing, and cost.
History is indeed cruel, and eventually weeds out bad design features. Looking at the vast majority of production basses with truss rod adjustment that DOESN’T require removing the neck, it’s pretty clear that History has Spoken. Leo got a whole lot of things right, this wasn’t one of them, which he clearly realized later on, or he wouldn’t have bothered to change it.
Perhaps Leo Fender was a idiot then, and the Telecaster, Stratocaster, and Precision Bass, are therefore all creations of an idiots mind.
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Leo Fender considered his G&L basses to be the pinnacle of his achievements and look where he put the truss rod adjustment
Yeah, when a person calls Leo Fender an idiot, it's obvious who the real idiot is, lol...
Ladies and gentlemen, please don't make me decipher tone via the written word. I will have no choice but to err on the side of caution. Please remember rule #1 which you all agreed to upon joining TB; that of respect.
I think that applied to his guitars as well. The G&L S-500 is a masterpiece:
S-500 RMC
Those MFD pickups are exceptional & the Dual Fulcrum Vibrato bridge is the best for a non-locking vibrato bridge.
The Comanche was an innovative design as well:
split-coil MFD pickups in a S-style body
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