Does this quartersawn roasted maple neck look funny to you?

Very pronounced grain for maple.

That is fast-growth maple (wide grain lines). And it's really not quartersawn...it's close though; you can see the angle through the scoop just behind the nut. I would probably call that rift sawn.

Pay no attention to some goober complaining about the wood splitting.

If a person complains of wood splitting while drilling, they don't know what they're doing. They're either using a cold chisel to 'drill' a hole, or they're not switching on the drill press motor before reefing on the handle 

I think that neck looks lovely and I'd buy it in a heartbeat. As mentioned by Peegoo, any one who drills a hole in a guitar neck that splits is entirely at fault themselves.

Allparts and their distributors sure don't make an effort to depict their necks very well. I've seen some where, while giving a description of the neck they only had a pic of the headstock, lol.

My favorite guitar sports a 20 year old Allparts vee shape/vintage profile Strat neck. The first and only guitar I've actually refretted, this time using SS frets. I ordered the same profile hoping for the same joy, although somehow I managed to get a nice light flame on the first.

I've had pretty good luck with Warmoth with one exception. I had a custom Tele neck built, AAA birdseye, all the appointments. It ended up being pretty unstable compared to my other necks, needing frequent trussrod adjustments. The thing that bugs me about Warmoth is all the weird little upcharges, like for their 59 Roundback/SRV/Clapton profiles. Do they really require that much more hand attention? I also wish they'd have a little more variety in their "In Stock" inventory as the vast majority of stuff is 10-16" compound radius and Standard Thin.

Someday though, I'll have them build me a Strat neck, Bloodwood and Bubinga, binding, sharkfin inlays...

Through all my years in business (43 of them) my belief was this: Good customer service is not truly demonstrated by getting it right every time. It's more about what happens when something doesn't go right.

The grain does look odd. I'd say it is more likely to be that the photographed one got a weird stain or is photographed oddly. Maybe the white balance is just off and they need someone who knows photoshop better.

Hard maple is too cheap for anyone to bother with "fake" maple. The only times I've seen maple be "bad" is when someone wants to use non straight grain, and even then it is usually because they have a flamey or birdseye piece that they can't bring themselves to throw to the scrap heap and lie to themselves and say it won't twist, or they just have no idea how to look at grain and think the sharp turn it takes around the 7th fret will never cause harm. If someone TRULY didn't know what they were doing they might use one of the soft maple species to make a neck which would likely be a bit of a disaster, but I'm not sure this has ever happened on any commercial scale. Usually the amateur who doesn't know the difference will buy only from lutherie supply places who DO know the difference.

I agree that the splitting is 100% user error. Wood splits. It is built into the physics of it. If you put a wedge into it, it will split. Except maybe if you're getting your woods from the petrified forest. Maple is sneaky. It is such a light, even color that it tricks us into thinking it isn't a super hard wood, but it is CRAZY hard. A lot of woodworkers dread working with hard maple because it always dulls tools and they have to use fresh saw blades if they don't want burn marks. It took me a while to get it through my head that maple was a tough wood - it just isn't intuitive for some reason.

When I was a lad I chopped down an 8” maple tree with an axe.








Eventually

The only way to know is to buy it and lick it.

Oh yeah! Aunt Jemima for sure!


Or whatever