It should be no surprise that the second time around is usually better than the first.  So many lessons are learned the first time around that can be corrected the next time around.  After playing my Les Paul style guitar for the summer and chatting with a local luthier it was clear that I needed to do some additional work in order to get the guitar up to snuff.

Overall, the guitar played well, but I could never get it to be in tune when playing the first few frets on the first couple of strings.  I figured that this was a set up issue, with the nut being too high. Thus, when fretting those first few frets, I was slightly stretching the string to reach the fret.  This made the notes sharp.  It got better as I went up the neck, but a Dm was just horrid!  The luthier confirmed this and also pointed out a few other issues:

• Yes, the nut was too high, but…
• The neck had a bit of a bow to it that the truss rod did not want to correct.
• The neck was still a bit chunky.  More D shaped, than a nice C.
• The frets were pretty low and a higher fret would help play-ability, especially with bending notes. It would also give more fret height for leveling.

So a few weeks ago I stripped off the hardware and went after fixing what I got wrong the first time around.

First up, was pulling the old frets.  Seemed crazy to be refretting a guitar that was only about 5 months old!  But this would also give me the chance to re-level the fretboard itself.  You can also see where the heel of the neck needs some serious weight reduction.  I’ll pull this heel in when I reshape the neck.

Nitrocellulose lacquer comes off pretty easily with a rasp!  I took a few breaths before I went at it.  It seems such a shame to wipe out a day of shaping, sanding, pore filling, and finishing.  But it really did need to happen.  I was also hoping that having less wood in the neck would allow the truss rod to more easily correct the front bow.  I was surprised at how much wood I was taking off of the neck.  I was definitely conservative when originally shaping the neck.  Though, as I played it and compared it to my acoustic and other guitars, it was pretty boxy.

That wasn’t so bad.  And it already feels better in my hand.  Next up was seeing if I could get the bow out of the neck.  With the neck reshaped, the truss rod definitely had an easier time with correcting the bow, but I maxed out the truss rod adjustment just straightening the neck without any string tension.  So something had to happen.  I started with using some clamps to mechanically bend the neck backwards with the truss rod loosened.  Using an iron, I heated up the fret board as if I was trying to remove it.  I used hide glue, so the heat should soften the bond between the neck and fretboard enough for the fretboard to slide just a tiny bit along the neck.  Then when the glue cools and resets, the fretboard should help hold the neck in the new position.  I did this a few times over three days and was able to get a bit of the bow out of the neck.  I still needed to relevel the fretboard, though.  No shots of either of these processes.  But I did end up with a neck that I felt was pretty level prior to fretting.  More on that in the next post.