During the life of your guitar it will almost assuredly require a neck reset. This is one of the most dreaded, upsetting and costly phrases in the repair tech’s vocabulary so please allow me to explain Scenario: The action on a guitar is uncomfortably high and the guitar is hard if not painful to play. Many people just believe that they are getting old or out of practice and stop playing the guitar. Some people will take the guitar to a repair person to have the problem addressed. After 10 seconds of examining the instrument, the repair tech says it will be about $500.00- $700.00 to fix the problem ----------------------- WHAT!!!????

Well, from a repairperson’s point of view, here’s what we found: When action gets high on a guitar the logical thing to do is to lower the action at the saddle (that is, to remove the saddle, make it shorter and replace it). But what happens when the top of the saddle is flush or almost flush with the top of the bridge? Here’s where the diagnosis comes in.

There are two options when this occurs. The less expensive way out is to “shave the bridge” or reduce the thickness of the bridge so we can in turn reduce the height of the saddle. This procedure only works if #1 the bridge is not already too thin (thinning it more will reduce tonal response and weaken the bridge causing it to split) or #2 the action is not so high that we can’t achieve acceptable action after shaving the bridge. At that point, our only choice is to recommend a neck reset.

Picture the strings on your guitar, when tuned to concert, acting as a straight edge on the top of your guitar. Now picture that the body of your guitar is clamped firm to a table so that it remains fixed at 90 degrees and that the neck of your guitar can pivot at the heel (like it’s on a hinge). If you lift the headstock up, away from the table (remember the neck is on a hinge mounted at the heel) you will see that the strings are now farther away from the fingerboard. Likewise, if you push the headstock down toward the tabletop past perpendicular, the strings will now lie on the fingerboard. This represents the physics of string action and of a neck reset.

Now, our job is to first, remove the neck from the guitar. If it is a bolt on neck, we may only have to remove the fingerboard tongue from the top of the guitar and unscrew the bolts. If it is a glued in neck such as a dovetail (higher quality Martins), we must drill holes under a fret in the fingerboard (so you wont see the holes later) and pump steam into the glue in the neck joint to soften it and remove the neck. When the neck heel has dried out, we must trim the bottom of the heel with a chisel to change the neck angle and therefore lower the action. This process takes a considerable amount of time to complete properly so that there are no gaps between the heel and the body (our job is that upon completion of the repair, no one except the owner and the repair person will know the repair was done). In most cases, we require a refret at the same time to eliminate any inconsistencies in the fingerboard caused by changing the angle of the neck in relation to the body.

Please note that some manufacturers make their neck joints very difficult to separate. This may increase the cost of the repair.

Elvis on Uranus---232 lbs.