Official Luthiers Forum!

Any tips on keeping the glue off of the truss rod and out of the channel? Does it even matter? The break exposes just the very end of the rod.

If you can remove the peghead, slit a drinking straw and put it around the truss rod. Otherwise.... go easy.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I use a pipe cleaner to push some car wax down the channel. And I've used Chris' straw trick also. Gotta get the bigger ones for malts.

Wrap the truss rod with transparent tape? That's a question, not a suggestion. No experience in such matters.

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Peter Havriluk

Upon closer inspection, the rods is one of those two way rods wrapped in blue plastic. So adding some kind of protective layer is probably unnecessary since the function of the rod is already protected by the blue plastic?

Go for it, Conor! Looks like it will mate easily, and the finish touch-up will be a breeze.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I agree that gluing the break carefully will yield a nearly invisible join line, but the neck wood showed a weakness - - - it broke. Might it break again? The grain lines aren't going to change course and that's how it broke. Is a reinforcement an appropriate (and very complicating) addition to gluing up the break? And how thorough a repair is rational for this guitar. I don't know if the guitar warrants a 'serious' repair or just a gluing-together of the break.

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Peter Havriluk

Gluing together IS a serious repair. And glued surfaces are made stronger. If it breaks, it will be somewhere else.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Chris, you're certainly right about the local strength of a glued-together repair. My concern was that the 'somewhere else' is a quarter-inch away from the first break. What little I was able to discern from the more recent picture was that the neck was seriously compromised as seen in the break, diagonally along the grain.
the neck was cut, seemingly, from wood that split along the grain and that a split didn't have far to travel to break the neck in half.

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Peter Havriluk

Peter - I've done a bunch of neck breaks like that through the years... No worries.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Experience trumps anxiety, every time!

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Peter Havriluk

It's not obvious in the pictures but the guitar is a $200 (that might be generous) brand new special. And I think it was stepped on. So, I'm not sure how possible it would be to mitigate all of the possible future problems.

If that crack followed an existing grain line, is this run-out??

Ed

There is some runout in that neck. Probably was made worse by the location of the truss rod. Just happened to be in a spot where it was a little worse?