Pete1967

Apologoes for being a month late to this party, but I might have something of value to add here.. but then again maybe not!! I've built quite a few 4 and 5 string necks and my experience thus far is that carbon rods do make an improvement in the stability, allbeit small. The science of this is not my strong point however my brother has a doctorate in mechanical engineering so I asked him to calculate the advantage for me a few months back. There appears to be two schools of thought... use carbon fibre to replace a truss rod so that the neck is so stiff the tension gives just about the right amount of relief, or add rods along with an adjustable truss rod. We concuded that the former would need ot be calculated on a build by build basis and the variables inserted in to the equasion due to the organic and inconsistent nature of wood would make this almost impossible in any practical sense, so we concentrated on the method of using CF rods with an adjustable truss rod. Clearly in this context the CF would not need to make the neck so stiff that the TR could not adjust the relief, so we ran a number of different CF rod profiles - more on that later. The main point of this story though is that we concluded that the advantage was not from stiffness in the longintudanal axis, nor really from the lateral axis since the CF rods will always deflect, however getting them to twist in the 'helical' axis is nigh on impossible particularly when there are two rods because thet will cancel each other out. So it's our belief that a neck with two moderately sized CF rods permenetly bonded can and will move longintudinally (which you want), but you're far less likely to end up with a twist - which has in fact happened with one four string neck I built witout CF but has never happened with any of my necks with CF in it. As I said earlier he calculated several rod sizes for me and concluded (given the constraint of actually having to be able to embed them in to the neck wood so you can bolt on (if a BO neck) and actually carve a profile without revealing the rod) that the best option is a 4mm x 7mm CF rod and next best is a 6mm round rod. 6mm rods are widely available from radio controlled model shops, but I've only ever found 4mm x 7mm in China - Ali Express to be precise. So, after some trial and error and some science I've concluded that the best neck construction is to laminate with an odd number of laminates, a mixture of woods (a healthy dose of something like Wenge or Padauk and Maple), two CF rods and an adjustable truss rod. I've yet to make anything larger that 5 strings because lets face, it just buy a guitar! Jus' my two penneth worth!

Good choice with the Chestnut. On a whim I bought a couple of boards of Spanish Chestnut and have found it to make excellent body wood. Slightly darker than Ash but sounds like Swamp Ash and is even lighter, plus it's very stable once dried property. A real bonus is that it's sustainable because it's a by product of the Spanish Sweet Chestnut farming industry....

I bought an East U-Retro off Neil, a complete gentleman and scholar. He even printed the PDF off John East's website and included it for me and it turned up exactly when and as promised. You won't get a better Basschat seller. Cheers Neil! Pete

Rothko and Frost are also very good for decals