Unstable neck

[bloke_zero]

I've a neck I put on a body I hade made and it seems pretty unstable. I set it up Fender style and then if I move it to a different environment, say studio (pretty stable temp) to home it needs setting up again after a day or so.

As I understand it the type of woods involved can make a difference? In this case it's maple with rosewood fingerboard. The weird thing about this neck is that the fingerboard tapers from 6mm at the headstock to 4mm at the body. Could that be part of the problem? None of my other basses really need constant setups.

[Acebassmusic]

When you say "setting up again" I'm assuming you mean adjust the truss rod? Are you trying to get a really low action? How low? Is it a really thin neck (front to back)? What bass is it?

 

Maple neck with a rosewood board are pretty standard materials for a neck and and I guess will have been used on  hundreds of thousands of instruments. The fretboard thickness taper does seem a bit strange but a 2mm variation in materials shouldn't make that much of a difference to rigidity and setup stability (unless the rest of the neck is really thin.....I'm thinking 2mm as a % of the overall neck thickness) 🤔

[bloke_zero]

I'm just going for a standard Fender set up with 2.5 - 3mm at the 12th. It's a chunky 50's style jazz neck with an inch depth pretty much the length of the neck. I did shave a mm or so off about a month ago so maybe it's all still settling.

 

Yes, having to adjust the truss rod, measuring with feeler guage. After a while it gets very buzzy around the e-string frets 1-5 and I re-adjust.

 

Ok - thanks! I guess I'm just going to have to live with it! I guess it may get more stable  over time. It's still pretty new.

[Acebassmusic]

It sounds as if the neck is chunky enough and that you're doing all the right  things. 🤔

 

For me, 3mm action at the 12th seems on the medium / higher side so that shouldn't be causing the issue at the first 5 frets. I had a look at the Fender manual and it recommends 0.012" to 0.014" neck relief. What are you setting? Depending on how you play (hard / lighter) you may want more gap. I play relatively lightly but have found sometimes if I increase the relief it allows me to lower the action at the bridge a little more. On my Sadowsky (5 string) its recommended releif is 0.012". I've found setting it at 0.016" allows me to get a 1.9mm action on the B string without any buzzing.

 

Hope you find a solution. 👍

[bloke_zero]

Interesting! I'm on 0.015. I'll try higher to see what happens. The problem is the oscillation between too much relief and too little. I don't think it's the best neck. The 2mm difference in fingerboard makes me think the attention to detail was not great.