Adding A Roasted Maple Guitar Neck Requires Vigilance

Roasted Maple Guitar Neck
Haywire Custom Guitars Limited Edition Nashville Tremolo +Roasted Maple Neck

Haywire Custom Guitars Limited Edition Nashville Tremolo + Roasted Maple Neck
Be Careful When Adding A Roasted Maple Guitar Neck. While
there are advantages such as being less expensive when no finish is
required and the fact that the roasting process brings out a beautiful
caramel color in the wood. There are drawbacks when adding a roasted
maple guitar neck.

 “Roasted Maple” Neck Issues…..

Remember the nature of a roasted maple guitar neck
is to be very brittle. Therefore, look closer at the roasted maple
guitar neck than you normally do other necks, specifically the screw
holes. It’s very interesting but can be a difficult problem if you are
not aware of  the characteristics of the roasted wood. Screw threads on the
neck plate screws can strip out in the neck holes. It’s caused by the
roasted wood being so brittle that the insides of the holes are much
more prone to strip out versus an standard kiln dried Maple neck. If you
have ever worked with 100 year old wood then you know what you’re
dealing with. Roasting ages and weakens wood significantly.


The stripping of the brittle wood screw threads inside the holes of a roasted maple guitar neck
cause the screws to loosen their grip. Strings will pull with lots of
pressure when in tune and can cause the screws to slip and the neck to
pull away from the body-thus lifting the strings off of the fret board.


This will  cause higher action and make it much more difficult to play. Soon
you will be “Fighting with your guitar”,  Eventually, the action will
to be way too high to play.


When I set it the action on this guitar the last time before shipping, it
was very low however the vibration and bumping of travel plus the
tension of string pulling can cause the very slow release of the screw
threads, screw slippage and thus higher action.This is all very
imperceptible at first but will accelerate over time and causes lots of
playing problems. 


string pulling can cause the very slow release of the screw threads

 I sent the fully assembled guitar back to a customer, including a roasted maple guitar neck,
he asked me to add to a body. When he got it back  he told me it was
difficult to play. The whole “difficult to play” problem was very
puzzling for me. It went out playing great. Since he didn’t change
anything I needed to look further into what could have happened. He sent
it back and I went to work. I took the whole guitar apart and studied every piece to try and track down what happened. Then, I remembered, the nature of “Roasted Maple” is to be very brittle.


loss of moisture which causes even more brittleness

After I discovered this could be an issue not widely known, I filled the neck
holes.  I used some small dowels to decrease the hole size and increase
the grip of the screws.


Next, I found some screws with a larger diameter thread to further decrease the hole size.


With those two changes it made the holes extremely tight and much less prone
to slipping and more able to keep the neck where I wanted it for great
low action.


I re-assembled the entire guitar, re-aligned the neck, oiled the fret
board to lessen the loss of moisture.  Moisture loss causes even more
brittleness.  Next the frets were leveled and we polished them, added
new strings, lowered the action more, re-set the intonation, tuned it
and tested and it plays just great. Because of the changes bearing in
mind the characteristics of the wood, it worked. I think the mystery of a
roasted maple guitar neck  has been solved.