At the Beach

When I go to the beach, I don't sunbathe, I don't surf, I don't drink, I do one thing: I swim out as deep as I can get away with, and just... float. There's an energy to deep water that i can't really describe, but it's magical. I'm not even scared that a sea monster is gonna get me, I'm just...floating. I used to think I was alone in this, until I heard Nick Mullen talk about doing the exact same thing in the exact same way on a podcast I'm not sure it's wise to name. Ok, I thought, it's not just me. I'm not an alien. I've come to understand in the years since that everyone finds this comfort in some way or another, just usually with less sand. Sometimes it's drugs, sometimes it's booze, sometimes it's getting in your car and... just being the worst, but whatever it is, we as humans take a certain comfort and serenity from staring into the abyss. Indeed, as Jean-Paul Sartre argues, it is not the abyss we fear, but the feeling that we might jump. What we fear is not the abyss, but ourselves.

Then the lifeguard yells at me and I have to swim back to shore.

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Fender's "Ski-Jump" Problem Finally Solved

If you're a guitar player, and especially if you're a vintage Fender afficionado, you are doubtlessly aware of the peculiar way they like to become misshapen. If not, here's the gist: over time, the neck tends to bend itself into an "S" shape with a dip from frets 12-18 and a pronounced lift at the last 2 frets or so. In guitarist parlance this is called the "ski-jump," and it makes setting up the guitar into a Sisyphean nightmare. I've heard all manner of theories as to why Fender necks develop their infamous ski-jump. The usually-fingered culprit is a tiny sandpaper shim in the heel pocket. It's a nice theory, but I've done about a thousand setups on Fenders and that doesn't seem to track. Here's the real reason: Fender's truss rods? they're just bad.

The earliest guitars were all acoustic, obviously, and as one could probably surmise, the earliest truss rods went on acoustic guitars. Now as anyone who has ever worked on a Martin can tell you, you are forced to use a nightmarishly-bent Allen wrench just to get up under the fretboard and into the truss rod nut. The reason for this is simple: the truss rod only extends from the headstock to the body joint. It can't go any further than that—there's no neck; the rest of the fingerboard is simply glued to the soundboard and the resulting neck profile has a slight concave bend up until the 14th fret at which point the board ever so slightly drops away. Classical guitars are the opposite: the neck has a curve until it hits the body joint, at which point the fingerboard actually kicks up. In both cases, the fingerboard has two distinct regions with 2 distinct profiles.

Then along comes Fender. Now we have guitar necks that extend the full length of the fingerboard and truss rods that follow suit. In the abstract, this sounds like a great idea: you get more control over the relief in the neck; what's wrong with that? Here's what's wrong with that. On a vintage-Fender-style heel-adjust truss rod, there is an anchor by the headstock, a rod that runs down the length of the neck, and nut at the heel tensioned against a washer somewhere around fret 19. The rod itself is sat in a curved channel and by tightening the nut you are essentially bending the neck along the forced curve of the rod. This is all well and good if the neck is backbowed, but you want to have a bit of relief in the neck for the guitar to, for example, play the thing, and what happens is the washer acts as a fulcrum and drives the nut upwards into the fingerboard, imparting the greatest amount force right at the 21st fret. This is the ski-jump zone, ladies and gentlemen.

Something big happened in the 70s: CBS bought Fender and switched to a new neck design. Features were trickled in over time, but altogether you have: a bullet truss rod that adjust at the headstock, truss rod anchor moved forward to around the 16th fret (just past the body joint), a larger headstock, different tuners but still with press-on bushings, and the infamous micro-tilt mechanism. Most of these design changes are fine. Pretty good, even. Fender's headstock design relies on low-profile tuners to get enough of a break angle across the nut, so the "F" tuners are fine. The Bullet truss rod (my personal favorite) gives you much easier access to the truss rod, and as a bonus no longer has a walnut plug to scuff up the first time you get at the truss rod. The only thing wrong with the '70s neck was the micro-tit.

This mechanism is infamous for its instability, and that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. The joint exchanges a whole neck-pocket's-worth of wood-on-wood contact for a single metal grub screw against a metal plate without so much an index hole to keep it from slipping. Even if you back the grub screw out entirely you still have metal-on-metal contact. Very little friction. To make matters worse, the CBS era saw quality control take a nosedive across the board, so you couldn't even count on a tight neck pocket to keep the mess in place. But the rest of the neck, I just want to reiterate, was a great design. Even the single machine screw is perfectly serviceable: Machine screws are almost always stronger than wood screws (or, indeed, the sheet metal screws guitar builders prefer). Just take out the body-side plate, put the wood back, you're golden. If one wanted to make the design even better, they could put knurling on the metal and end up with a fantastically stable joint.

Fast-forward to 1985. The CBS era has ended, QC is improving again, and one by one the '70s-era neck features are being either reverted to vintage spec or changed further. Except for one thing. Care to guess? That's right: Fender kept the MICRO-TILT. They kept the one design that was actually detrimental to neck stability and ditched all the good changes. What's worse, they made the micro-tilt screw press against the truss rod anchor resulting in what I can only describe as a dedicated neck warping device. It's really bad. Unfortunately, perception of quality is more important than quality itself, and it just so happens that the best parts of the '70s neck were also the most visible. The bad ones were hidden away, doing their stupid little misdeeds in obscurity. Most people see 4 bolts and think good, 3 bolts and think bad, almost instinctually. (Luckily, the "70s-style" necks you see now keep the truss-rod design and the vintage tuner holes and just ditch the plate entirely. If you're looking to do a build or replace a neck, get a bullet. You will never get a ski-jump.)

Next time you're building a partscaster, get yourself a '70s neck. They're the best deal in vintage gear.

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