bcombs510 wrote: Is it common for the last two frets to have been so crazy high compared to the rest of the board?
What I did was take the truss rod out of tension so the neck would be flat. The straight edge I used didn’t quite reach to the end of the board (3 or 4 frets shy). I checked it was flat by trying to slide a 0.002 feeler gauge between the straight edge and the frets. I couldn’t get the gauge under any frets with the exception of 5,6 and 10. I took that to mean those were just lower , which was also what I experienced with the fret rocker.
I proceeded to level 1-14 with the long beam, no issues. I took just a little off the top in order to fully remove the marker I used to mark the tops. I then used a shorter beam to do the extension. I always put a couple layers of tape at one end of the short beam and let it ride on top of the 14th to put some fall away into the extension. Unfortunately I was focused on the area near the body joint and wasn’t realizing that 21-22 has like half the height gone.
Is that normal for the end of the extension to be humped up like that?
That’s for the link, I will read it.
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Hi Brad:
Just saw this.
Yes it's not unusual for Gibsons and Epiphones to have a slight curl near the headstock in the first couple of frets region as you noticed. This is also why Gibsons and Epiphones often break here too at the head stock. The combination of a very slim neck profile, a large truss rod channel and the position of the truss rod not having any adjustable impact in this area because it's where the rod ends and the adjustor begins is the cause of this. You should be able to flatten the neck though. If not dress it flat.
All Gibsons have finish on the truss rod even going way back decades. It's their manufacturing process to spray lacquer over the entire headstockand truss rod exposed parts and of course there is no truss rod cavity cover installed at that stage yet either. The finish may not have been touched on the rod yet too and that's very common these days when guitars are sold from sources who don't set them up or do ****** set-ups and may not touch the rod.
Believe it or not Gibson's fret work is not bad lately. Both my 2019's had an excellent level set from the PLEKs. I bought an SG Standard and a Les Paul Standard last year when Henry was toast to help our home state heritage company recover. Be aware that Gibson has various programs that they run various models through with the PLEKs creating some differences in the results AND from Gibson's perspective the time on the machine each guitar takes. Or, in other words the higher end models spend more time on the PLEKs and may have fewer tooling marks visible and a more consistent level set.
Epiphones depending on the vintage may have also been PLEKed. Regardless their fret work is usually very good as are most imports in my experience. What I suspect is the one you have was exposed to some nasty RH conditions and perhaps the wood was not seasoned all that well either.
Simply do a fret dress with the process you learned from Dave and I and it will have a first class fret plane that will support very low action and even drop tunings preferred by heavy metal vomit music enthusiasts. By the way I love strapping on my SG, cranking my Bassman, stepping on my Hendrix Dunlap Fuzz Face pedal and playing along with Heavy metal too so no disrespect intended in my often judgmental remarks.
Good on you for fixing this one.
Lastly loose frets on an Epiphone is something that I've never seen since they have been imports. This leads me to believe that the instrument has dried out or been over humidified perhaps multiple times.
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