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On my Elewine Fretting tapes he always adds fallaway to the board extension. Is it necessary to have fallaway, will you get fret buzz without it ? I've followed the tapes in the past but I'm wondering if it is needed.

It is not nessasary if you properly level the frets. Now with age due to rotation of the neck block some guitars will appear to have fall off but what is really happening is due to neck block rotation. And some builders do intentionally taper off the last 4 .

I'd say you definitely need to sand some fall away into your fretboard extension when leveling if you level after the neck is attached. If you don't you will probably get a little rise in the extension after string up and have to deal with it by sanding down the frets there which looks bad. It all depends how much your guitars move when strung up but I usually shoot for 0.010-0.015. I've been lucky enough to have been able to tap the brains of several guys that have had years of experience in high end guitar sales and they told me the first thing they do when evaluating a new or used guitar is sight down the fretboard and see if there is any rise in the extension. They like to see a touch of fall away or at least dead flat. If there is a rise it's the kiss of death and a new one gets sent back to the factory.
TJK

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

This neck has a canterlivered tongue supported by 4 carbon fiber rods and a Doolin adjustable neck joint.

Well that's a different animal eh? No personal experience there. I would have to defer to someone else on whether fall away is needed on that type of neck.
Wouldn't seem like you would really need much. How come you are not using carbon reinforcement in the shaft portion? Looks cool!
TJK

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

More rod, more expense, more work(routing) and I don't know if it is worth it since there is a truss rod. I want to just make the tongue solid. Some just use 2 rods instead of 4. And some inset the top of the rod into the fret board. Seems like a lot of work with alining the grooves to match to me and might not be worth it. Some of this stuff just seems like over kill to me sometimes. You put all that stuff into a guitar when Martins and Gibsons etc. don't have it and they do fine and have for years. Then you're lucky if you can sale it for cost.

I don't build in fall away, but sand the fretboard close to level with 150 on a rubber sanding block from the neck/body joint (12th or 14th fret) up. It creates a 'sort-of' compound radius (which may be useful to the player as it's unlikely anyone will play chords that high) and decreases the likely-hood of a buzz in frets 14-20.

Learned it from Kathy Wingert. That's just my 2 cents. It works nicely.

I build in .010 - .020" of fall-away from the body joint to the last fret on common shapes like OMs, dreads, SJs and L-OOs. Flattening the upper transverse brace and the natural compression that the close set frets on the fret board extension create seems to always result in around .015 of fall away.

I was on the fence about the need for fall away until I read here that Mario shoots for about .015 of fall away too. That was all I needed to know to make it work for me.

It depends on how low you want the action, and "how low you can go" really depends (all else being equal) how heavy you are with your strumming/picking hand. The fingerpicker can get away with lower action than the mad downstroker.

Also depends how far up the neck you tend to play - if you're mostly playing cowboy chords, you can raise the saddle without much happening to the action between the nut and #5.

For that reason, because they tend to use more of the neck than the typical acoustic player, electric players require some fallaway.

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The member formerly known as erikbojerik....

Well then I guess the answer is Yes! Since it's impossible to tell who is going to be playing the guitar and how. Well I guess I'll just rip out the last half of the frets now and sand the fallaway in and fret and glue it over again.

Ok, Thanks Todd.

Chris, I don't have a lot of experience with this, and I'm mostly interested in archtops. They are a different animal than what you normally build. Archtops, of course, have a fingerboard extension that cantilevers out over the top, and this piece often seems to "move" seasonally in a way that is independent of the neck. So, a lot (I'm sure not all) of archtop builders put some fall off in their fingerboards. How this relates to a flat top builder, I really can't say for sure. But in my very limited experience, some fall off is a good thing. I look at it this way: How often does the player go that high on the fingerboard? If a little fall off keeps the road unobstructed, I think it's a small price to pay for the occasional times when the player DOES go that high and finds a little higher action in that limited area. That's just my opinion, and I know it won't be shared by all.
Patrick

Chris--I end up bit a bit of "natural" falloff in the frets above the body with my archtops.
Have never heard a player complain about this and I think it is a good thing for various reasons mentioned above.
Probably good insurance against buzzing problems caused by wood movement over time.
Nelson Palen