Why Aluminum necks didn't catch on

[KramerDon]

I was reading the very interesting wenge/wenge thread about different wood species for necks/fingerboards and it made me wonder(again) why aluminum bass necks didn't catch on.I haven't really played anything other than my Kramer 650B since the 70's and have always thought of it as a quality bass. Yet I have never been able to compare it to any really good basses to know for sure.I remember Travis Bean's used aluminum and the early Kramers,but I don't think anybody's tried it since.It's certainly held up well and the bowling ball material fingerboard doesn't show any wear after almost 35yrs,including 6 nites @week for several yrs.
Does anybody have any insite as to why it's not used anymore? Just curious whether it's sound related,costs or production problems etc.? Thanks and have a great week!!
(I hope this is the appropriate thread(luthiers corner),sorry if I'm wrong!!)

 

[Schlyder]

A friend of mine had one... the neck was terrible....Unstable as a mental hospital during a full moon

 

[Plantbrain]

Thermal expansion seems to be an issue from what one guy said, still, you can buy a slab O Aluminum see ebay and "fretless + Aluminum"....they sound sort of cool on the clips....... weird SOB's.

 

[superdick2112]

Thermal expansion seems to be an issue...

Exactly. I've played several Kramer aluminum-necked basses, and the tuning was always unstable until the neck warmed up. The sound was alright, but temperature was always an issue, especially when playing outdoor gigs.

 

[KramerDon]

I've found it critical to let it adjust to room temp,if I bring it in from winter temps,tune and start playing it'll go way out as it acclimates.But once I figured out how temp sensitive it was,it hasn't been a problem.If it's room temp when tuned,it'll stay in tune.
I can see where that could be a big problem in Canada,but it gets very cold here in Michigan too.

I guess I've never played an outdoor gig in cold weather,but I can see that being a potential problem

 

[stepswork4me]

Extreme temp sensitivity just seems like a hassle to plan around. 95 and humid outside.... 70 and dry inside club.... an hour or more for acclimation.... I'll stick with wood.

 

[Wescottguitar]

They feel awful, and the guitar or bass they were connected to usually weighed a ton. Travis Bean necks had VERY flat radiuses on the fingerboards, which feels terrible.
So it was partly the neck, partly the bass......

 

[JonahTheAmazing]

Wood, even though it suffers the same temperature problem sometimes, is the tried and true material for necks. I've never played an aluminum necked instrument, but I don't know if I would find it comfortable.

 

[Lo-E]

My old, early 80s Kramer played great and sounded great.

Unfortunately, it also weighed about 3000 lbs. and every time I took my left hand off the neck it plunged straight down. Honestly, that was as much as design flaw as a materials issue: the top horn was much too short, but the aluminum neck sure didn't help the issue.

I kept it for recording for a few years because it sounded really good, but I couldn't use it live and eventually gave it up.

 

[mpdd]

my friend sand cast a precision out of aluminum in our sculpture class, i think he melted it down to make something else shortly thereafter due to the extreme weight, i did look really cool though

 

[SGD Lutherie]

I remember Travis Bean's used aluminum and the early Kramers,but I don't think anybody's tried it since. It's certainly held up well and the bowling ball material fingerboard doesn't show any wear after almost 35yrs,including 6 nites @week for several yrs.

There were a few others.

Early Rickenbacker lap steels were made from aluminum.

Messenger guitars had aluminum necks back in the late 60s. Mark Farner from grand funk played one of those.

Veleno guitars were entirely made of aluminum. Todd Rundgren played one shaped like an Ankh

Larry Hartke had his aluminum back bass. I got the play the prototype, and it was very nice. The neck was designed by Phil Petillo who also designed the neck for gary Kramer.

For the 7075 aluminum used, the thermal expansion coefficient is 13.1 between 68 - 212°F. So that's 13.1 microinch per degree F. They make aircraft out of this stuff, so I don't think it moves all that much with temperature.

I had a Kramer Duke bass, and it never went out of tune. The neck was solid as a rock.

I think players just don't like the feel of metal, and the stuff is harder to work with than wood for most builders.

The fingerboards on Kramers, as well as the original Steinbergers are made from Ebonol, which is technically known as XXX Black Paper Phenolic.

I use it for fingerboards on a lot of my basses. Nasty stuff to work with, but it's very durable. Works well on fretless basses. Shows very little marking even with round wounds.

 

[Jim Nazium]

I played one of those Kramer basses with an aluminum neck several years ago, and the issue for me was the weight. It played and sounded fine, but it felt like it weighed twice as much as a regular Fender bass, plus it had the most extreme neck dive of any guitar or bass I've ever played.

I would think that it would be possible to build a lightweight aluminum neck - before carbon fiber bicycles became all the rage, the lightest racing bikes were aluminum - but maybe the manufacturing process is just too costly.

 

[Duke21]

I played one of those Kramer basses with an aluminum neck several years ago, and the issue for me was the weight. It played and sounded fine, but it felt like it weighed twice as much as a regular Fender bass, plus it had the most extreme neck dive of any guitar or bass I've ever played.

I would think that it would be possible to build a lightweight aluminum neck - before carbon fiber bicycles became all the rage, the lightest racing bikes were aluminum - but maybe the manufacturing process is just too costly.

There should be no problem making a Al neck that is as light or lighter than maple neck, so the Kramer basses was just not very optimal designed in order to achieve max stiffness, high strength and minimal weight. In actually don't think that extruding/ butting / swaging an aluminum profile from let's say 6061 T6 or 7005 alloy will cost more machining a fine wood neck. I'll just guess that such an hollow Al neck will sound bad, cold and not organic.

 

[KramerDon]

Those are all certainly valid "cons".I guess I've lived with mine so long I don't think about how heavy it is and when I was playing 6 nites @ week we always had rooms in the hotel we played in so it was usually already at "club temp"so tuning wasn't an issue either.
Everyone's different and has had different experiences but to me,it's always been huge to not have to worry about my aluminum neck ever warping or twisting.I've always thought it had more sustain and "brightness" than traditional basses too but again I really don't have any experience with quality basses to compare so that's admittedly just a guess.

 

[Lo-E]

I don't know which model you have, KramerDon, but some of those basses had a longer top horn that went all the way out to the 12th fret. Those basses were just as heavy, but they didn't neck dive. If I had had one of those instead of the one I had - who knows? I might have kept it! It sure sounded great.

I remember playing some of the longer top horn ones at pawn shops and music stores from time to time and liking them better than mine. I think I remember seeing one in some live Santana footage a few years ago, too. Can't remember who the bassist was, but remember that Kramer!

 

[Ruckus_Instrmts]

Electric Guitar Company is the only current maker of all aluminum instruments that I know of. Buzz of the Melvins seems to really like his. Rick Toone uses a solid aluminum neck core instead of a truss rod which is interesting also.

And why you don't see many people making them now; I would attribute that to cost and demand. It takes more expensive equipment to turn a block of aluminum into a neck then to make that same neck out of wood.

 

[pilotjones]

Seeing as aluminum has a linear expansion coefficient of 24e-6 /C, steel 12e-6 /C, and wood (for both oak and pine, parallel to the grain, which are the two numbers I could find and which I'll take to be representative of most woods given the general dissimilarities of oak and pine) of 5e-6 /C, you can see how while neither metal is ideally matched to wood, aluminum is nearly twice as badly matched.

In a neck having a fretboard length of 24", going through 22 C (=~40 ˚F) temperature change, this means that the differential in expansion between an aluminum neck and a wooden fretboard, or vice versa, would be .010". Just going by feel, I'd say that this is almost certainly enough to change the tuning, and I would expect also the relief curve of the neck.

 

[fdeck]

I bought a fretless metal-neck Kramer in 1981. It was a wonderful player except for being heavy. Also, it was from the era when boutique basses had sexy-looking but woefully tiny bodies that made them particularly top heavy.

I sold it to a friend a few years ago. Amazingly, he bought a short scale fretted Kramer neck on eBay, and it fit the same neck pocket. He made a bridge that sits in the bridge pickup cavity. It's an odd bass, but plays wonderfully, and is just right for a guitarist who occasionally plays bass.

I've offered to buy the fretless neck back from him, but he's hesitant.

 

[Lesfunk]

I think once they figured out how to make carbon fiber necks, Aluminum became kind of pointless as an alternative to wood

 

[Fullback32]

I know a lot of people just didn't care for the weight, if nothing else. They ARE heavy. As for myself, my Kramer 650B and I have been together for 33 years and it's still my favorite bass to this day. I wouldn't trade or sell it for anything. I suppose it's that sense of familiarity that makes it my favorite (and it sounds great of course).

As I've gotten older (I'm 48 now), though I use my Kramer more than any of my other basses, I have to admit a certain sense of relief in the shoulder when I have to switch to my Jackson Kelly for songs in Drop D tuning. It's much lighter!