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What leads to a maxed out truss rod?
Hey,
I’m really curious about your thoughts; In your experience, what leads to a maxed out truss rod? I found out this mainly on Fenders so far. I had numerous guitars that had the truss rod tightened all the way. Some were really bad regarding the relief, some were “fixable” with a couple of washers behind the nut.
Were those particular guitars slowly gowing towards that since the day they left the factory, being just a matter of time, due to an improper rod install? Is it a combinations of factors? Storage? Or ultimately it’s just the wood having a mind of it’s own and you can’t really predict what’ll happen?
I also encountered this on two of my personal guitars, one being a 70’s strat and the other a recent telecaster deluxe. After adding two washers, I could get the strat neck even into a back bow.
With the telecaster it’s a bit different. I managed to get it to .006″ relief, also with two washers but the nut was tightened pretty firmly. In the past months, the neck has bowed just a bit more further. Even though I wasn’t feeling really comfortable about it, I tightened the rod a bit more. This is the last adjustment I can make before breaking something that’s for sure, but being mine I took the risk. In these cases I’m clamping the neck to force it into a back bow to help the rod. I don’t use heavy gauge strings, 10-46 in standard tuning, being careful regarding the temperatures and humidity.
So long story short; due to this incident, I began thinking, “what if the neck will just continue bowing little by little in time? What’s really going on and why? Are these things preventable or was it just a dud from the start?”
This is a rather happy example, I had lots of nice fenders in the shop with maxed out rods and way more relief.
I couldn’t entirely wrap my head around this whole phenomenon so far.
Thanks,
Vlad.
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1 Reply
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My understanding is the usual cause of this is the adjustment nut sinking into the wood it’s seated on. Eventually, it’s far enough in that you run out of threads to tighten the nut, and can’t go any farther. Adding washers moves the nut out (and often reinforces the seating area) allowing you to go further. This is a problem of single action truss rods, as double-action truss rods seat against their own metal end block.
I think when this happens it’s caused by someone accidentally over-tightening when they meant to loosen, a truss rod with really short threads, or maybe weak or damaged wood at the adjustment nut seating area.
There’s probably more to it than that, but that’s what I know.
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