Post by funkykikuchiyo on May 14, 2020 9:27:22 GMT -5
Frankly....the reality is it HAS to be something VERY wrong on the front end that a poly finished maple neck would change that radically in just a few days when introduced into a different climate. My guess, their wood is improperly cured or just plain not suited to the application.
Alright, let's calm down. The most important thing to know about wood is this: Wood comes from trees. Trees aren't designed to make furniture, guitars or even firewood, they're designed to grow. Part of that growth is being able to absorb, release, and transport water very, very efficiently. That means a piece of wood is always going to respond to humidity. Why? Because wood comes from trees. "Seasoning" releases the moisture deep in the cells, but (and this is important) it does not eliminate its ability to take on and lose moisture. If you had a guitar neck (or acoustic guitar top, back, side set, etc.) that was not "seasoned" before being built, you'd have much, much bigger problems than fret ends. The peghead might split along the grain at the end, it would twist severely, it would suddenly be very loose in the pocket, the frets might fall out, the finish wouldn't have adhered properly and would have serious issues, blushing, falling off, who knows. Chances are good the guitars wouldn't even make it to final inspection before self destructing, much less through the shipping on the slow boat to the US shipping center and then out to the retailer.
In my experience, newer guitars do move a bit more with humidity changes. But, let's slow down here. By "new" I don't mean that guitar making has changed or that the materials have changed, I mean a guitar that is relatively close to its own build date. A 5 year old boy in the 12th century is still a "young man", because we're talking about his age at the time, not his age relative to now, and a guitar built in 1940 and played in 1941 is a "new" guitar. Also, wood still moves from point A to point B on old guitars. Trust me. I do frequent repairs and restorations in the southwest desert. I've had guitars from the 19th century dry out and rehumidify just like the "cheap" guitars they're making today. Why? Back to the original point: they are made of wood, and wood comes from trees.
One major difference in manufacturing from (very roughly) the 80s and 90s on is humidity control in factories. Factories (and wood storage, for that matter) are kept at a consistent 45-50 percent relative humidity. This was not the case in antiquity. If your guitar was built either in a very dry climate, or in the case of something in a normal climate in the winter, then it is going to be in greater danger of having problems in high humidity than other guitars. It will be relatively immune from dry weather damage, though.
Another difference is fretting has gone through many phases over the years. Almost all mass produced Fender style necks are fretted with a reasonably large fret, and ground down to bare wood on a large belt sander, and cleaned up by hand. If you look at the necks, you can see signs of where that sanding occurred, and it would be physically impossible to not sand the frets back all the way. On many older guitars, you'll see the frets not going all the way to the edge of the fingerboard to begin with, having side bevels that are too dramatic, and the frets being very small to begin with. Yeah, you didn't feel fret ends as much, but you also got frets that were worn out from day one and your E strings really wanted to fall off the edge. In the days when there were heavier strings and the expectations for bending and vibrato were low it didn't matter as much, but trust me... players today are VERY picky about how much playing area they get, and manufacturers have adapted to that.
A couple points I'll make on the maple necks: When a darker wood is used as a fingerboard, that piece of wood is going to be quartersawn. That means that the grain lines (although hard to see on these pieces) will go up and down in the piece. It also is not likely to have much, if any, grain run out. Grain run out is a lot like grain direction, but isn't always immediately apparent. Imagine a long log, and then imagine cutting it up in a more cone-like shape, so you're running straight along the grain for the board, but also sort of diagonally. This isn't nearly as necessary with tropical woods, because they grow much straighter. They grow much straighter in tropical areas because of heliotropism. Heliotropism is the behavior of plants to turn to face the sun - since the sun doesn't move much in the sky in the tropics, meaning fewer seasonal changes, it doesn't have to twist back and forth as much as it grows. Wood does not change size along every dimension equally, but instead by wildly different amounts based on which dimension is in question. (note: the actual amounts that wood moves in different humidities has been studied and is well documented - I have it all in a book here next to me, and it is fairly easy to find online).
So, what does this mean for the maple necks? Well, one piece maple necks are rarely quartersawn. Further, they pretty much never are cut with grain run out in mind. The challenge is usually just to find decent straight grain so you don't get twists or humps in the fingerboard, and then they call it a day. I wish manufacturers did a better job of this to be honest... but, the ones who do it poorly aren't the Mexican Fenders. It is usually "custom shop" level stuff from a variety of manufacturers because they're trying to use a prettier piece, and they're in a mind set that a prettier piece is "higher quality"... but, they're forgetting the cardinal rule. Wood comes from trees. Trees don't care what you're doing with the wood. The just want sun, water, and minerals, and to have big leaves and to scatter nuts and seeds. Funnily enough, I've had better luck with Mexican Fenders* than with higher end stuff. They're thinking more practically. I see this with back and side sets on acoustics sometimes, too. Guitar makers try to get fancy and use "figured" woods, but what they're using is in reality just knots and twists, or big burl, which is like trying to make a guitar out of end grain. Additionally specific to necks and fingerboards, this means (among very many other things) that a tropical log is going to be very straight, and the cuts for a high yield will likely not ever create grain run out issues. They'll all be nice straight cuts, even if it isn't evenly quartersawn, the grain run out issue will not even be a thought. If you're constantly cutting around twists and turns, you're going to end up with run out, even if you're getting nice quatersawn pieces (which they usually aren't even bothering with on maple, anyway).
*(the ones I have had problems with are some of the road worn necks, but that is a finishing issue - finishing one side of a board and not the other is never a good idea, and that is pretty much what they do)
Moving away from necks for a moment, the grain run out issue plays a very big role when it comes to acoustic guitar tops. I remember watching a video with master luthier Jose Romanillos, and there are no pre-dimensioned top pieces from StewMac there. He has a big chunk of quartersawn spruce, and splits it into a billet with a mallet and a froe. When you do this, the wood will naturally split down along its medullary rays, the little channels that run radially out of the log. This gives you the strongest (and arguably most resonant) board possible. It is also the most stable for humidity. People doing high end hand work a la Ron Swanson or anyone who has ever appeared alongside Roy Underhill (of PBS fame) know this, because they can spend ridiculous amounts of time on something critical, and have it be profoundly stable. The problem with making guitars like this is that the amount of waste is orders of magnitude higher than sawing, and if all guitar tops were made like this, we'd have run out of spruce a long time ago. The classical woodworkers knew this too, that is why cabinet backs are built from boards with non-glued tongue-and-groove joints, so there is room for expansion and contraction. But, that's a bit off subject.
The point is that anyone who works wood needs to realize that humidity is always going to affect the wood. Always. There is no "high quality" wood that ceases to be affected by humidity. What you want is plastic. The woodworking and carpentry worlds never really question this, it is only in the guitar world where people somehow find the rules of physics to be incredibly cruel and cheap. Remember: wood comes from trees.