Straghtening a Gibson Bass neck before replacing fingerboard

[Brandon]

Hey everyone,

I have a '76 Gibson Ripper Bass in the shop right now. The previous owner before my customer removed the frets and destroyed the maple fingerboard. The plan is to replace the board w/ ebony, and replace the truss rod that's broken while the fingerboard is off. 

The neck has some pretty gnarly upbow. I have removed the old maple FB and truss rod, and the neck still has some pretty bad bow. Before I install the truss rod and glue on the new fingerboard, I want to get the neck as straight as possible. I previously tried the truss rod rescue kit from stewmac before removing the fingerboard, and even with new threads, the truss rod still couldn't get the bow out of the neck.

Any tips? I might try heat/moisture/clamping to straighten it, but I'm not really sure on how to go about it. I don't want the moisture to damage/cloud the finish. I just feel like gluing a FB to a bowed neck is a bad idea. 

I'm also planning on going with the 2 way hot rod truss rod due to customer preference. I feel like this neck might need some heavy duty truss rod adjustment available, so do you guys think there's a better choice of truss rod for this bass?

[Frank Ford]

IF you are replacing the fingerboard, I doubt there's much need to actually straighten the neck itself before putting things back together.  My experience is that gluing up the board with hide glue and clamping it straight in the process does an amazingly good job of straightening and also stiffening the neck.  A good hide glue job is the key to stiffness, I think.

[Russell Vance]

Hi Brandon,

Check your depth of truss rod slot (I'm not familiar with Gibson bass internals) as the Hot Rod truss rods are deeper than most rods.  The two way TRED rods by Lmii.com are shallower and just as beefy.  As FF says, clamp it flat or  and glue the new fingerboard on.  Subsequent refretting (if you don't pre-fret) will stiffen it up and back bow it a little anyway.  

I would normally put in some graphite fibre if the bow was significant and for future/longevity but that depends whether you are jigged and tooled to do this.

Rusty.

[Kerry Krishna]

 Brandon, a question came to mind about the original wrecked fretboard: What was going on with the actual fretslots? Were they still filled with the fret tang of the original frets, or were the slots filled with white plastic, or ? 

[Brandon]

The original slots were filled with glue and sawdust. The person who filled them sanded the FB with the nut still on the guitar, so the end near the nut was almost the original thickness, and the middle is about 1/2 as thick as the original thickness. They also seem to have sanded it with their hand or a flat block. The radius was destroyed. 

I'm waiting on the ebony to come in and hopefully I should be gluing it up soon. I'm going with the 24" HotRod from StewMac, and I'll have to elongate the channel by about 1.5 inches. The width and depth of the truss rod slot from Gibson is the exact same as the HotRod requirements, but I cant quite fit the 24-incher into the neck as it stands now. I'll have to figure out some sort of jig to extend the slot and post some pictures whenever I have it done!

[Robbie Collins]

Make sure the truss rod nut is in the neutral position before gluing the fingerboard.