to give a Readers Digest version of the saga...........in a dumbass moment (and alcohol may have been involved...) I got too heavy handed while adjusting the trussrod and snapped the end off. Some google research revealed that Stew Mac makes a truss rod rescue kit for just this situation. No one in my area had the tool though. One place offered to do the repair for free if I bought them the tool. BUT Stew Mac was out of stock. I had seen Dan Erlewine demonstrate using the tool on Youtube. I am currently unemployed, so I checked the location of Dan's shop. It was a mere 400 miles away. I contacted him to see if he would do the repair while I waited because I am really leery of trying to ship that ridiculously thin neck that is attached to that ridiculously big head stock (you have to be a T-Bird lover to understand...) Dan said he would try. So....one morning I got up at 3AM and hit the road for Ohio. I dropped it off and went out for coffee. He called me in an hour and asked if I could give him a couple more hours to work at it. Of course I said yes. He called me later and said to come see and it "wasn't good". He had managed to deepen the trussrod pocket and re-thread the rod. (Because of the head stock design he had to remove all the tuners and fab an extension for his thread cutter) but he couldn't get the neck to straighten and didn't want to force it. His opinion was that it was unplayable. He said that long term if the $ were available, he would remove the fret board and install a couple carbon fiber reinforcing rods in the neck. That is not currently in the budget so I headed home devastated. I figured that if Dan Erlewine says it is dead.....its dead. I got it home and tuned it up and found that while the action is pretty high and the neck has a twist, it intonates pretty closely. Having learned to play back in the 70's when beginner basses had actions that were inches off the neck, I can deal with a high action, so that is where I am now at. As I mentioned earlier today, I am an engineer so I have to tinker. Against my own better judgement I unstrung it yesterday and fashioned a jig to put the neck in a back bow. I left it like that for 1/2 a day and then tried to tighten the trussrod. It appears that the new threads that Dan cut are already bottomed out. So I put it back together and called it a day. I wish the action was lower but it is what it is........a 41 year old friend who is wearing out. Not unlike its 56 year old owner.
