Official Luthiers Forum!

I read this on a builders site yesterday. As it flies in the face of my experience and what I have read i thought I would ask the experts here. What do you think?

"The truth is that a guitar will play at its best with a dead flat neck. The best luthiers and expert repairmen know this and set up guitars accordingly. It bears repeating… if your neck is flat and the action at the 12th fret is correct, the guitar should play beautifuly with no buzzing. If there is buzzing, there are one or more high frets. These can be addressed individually but of there are more than one or two, I recommend that all the frets be dressed (leveled, crowned, and polished.) Really aggressive players may need a little relief due to the heavy playing style but for most of us this is not the case. "

I find its usually always necessary to put some relief in. The trick is to use as little as necessary.

As pointed out in the previous post, fret work is the key to a buzzless fretboard. I don't actually measure my relief but set it by eye and know it is so close to flat that it fits into the parameters Todd stated.
Tom

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

The website that quote comes from has a picture of a guitar with the action set a quarter of an inch high at the 12th fret LOL!

For reference, I set my guitars at either 3/64ths-9/128ths E to E, or 4/64ths-9/128ths E to E, hard strummers can get a little more relief if he wants.

I guess I'm a "hobbyist" luthier, according to him, since I need a little relief in my necks in order to set the action lower than he does.

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Old growth, shmold growth!

For what it's worth, I'd say dead flat with no string tension. I am sure I heard that first on the Benedetto series of videos on archtop building. Then, of course, some relief should show up once string tension is applied. Then adjust the truss rod accordingly. And I add a little fall-off at the neck-to-body joint. That's just my take on things. I probably just kicked a hornet's nest by posting this opinion, but that's what I have done and it hasn't let me down yet. I must add, though, that I build for myself--not for sale to a clientele.
Patrick

In classicals, many top builders put in some relief. Sometimes the shape is complex, not only curving up around the 5th - 7th frets, but also twisting the fingerboard, because each string has a little different relief. It has been common for otherwise good repairmen to be unaware of this and deem a like new Ramirez neck to be warped; thereafter, removing the frets and planing the neck flat.

I don't use that approach. I make the fretboard a little thinner on the Bass side. The fretboard cambered very slightly - even on the so called 'flat' one's. The treble side gets hardly any relief - 0.1 mm, the bass side a bit more - 0.3 mm's.
Virtually zero change in relief with string tension, over a 6 month period. Of course that might change over a much longer period but I did measure one instrument after 18 months and it had remained the same.