Ibanez Soundgear 5 string bass repair

[Alexander Allgood]

Hi everyone. I recently refretted a 5 string ibanez sound gear for a friend customer/ he recently brought it back over for a seasonal truss rod adjustment. I adjusted the truss rod and all seemed fine. customer plays prog metal. super low action very odd tunings with higher tension than would normally be on it. when he traveled from my shop to his practice space, the truss rod started breaking through the back of the neck.  action is now rediculously high. I told customer I would see what i could do for him. What are my options here? I was thinking about removing the fingerboard  pulling the truss rod out and reglueing the splitting channel, then reinstalling and stablizing the rod and regluing the finger board. anyone see any issues with this on an ibanez? I have a bad feeling the fingerboard is on there with epoxie.  

[Paul Verticchio]

Hi Alex.

A lot of the solution will depend on how much the customer is willing to pay for the repair/restoration.

What you describe can be accomplished but the weak area where the TR cracked through may remain an issue. You'll have to correct the issue that caused the problem before proceeding.  Given you customer's playing style, I infer the bass is subject to stresses beyond it's design parameters.  That's probably what caused the TR to be compressed so tightly, therefor causing the break through.

If it's a upper end series of the SG line, it would be worth repairing.  If it's under a 400 series, a replacement neck off of e-bay or another source is probably the best (most economical) bet.

You may also wish to counsel your customer that he may be using the wrong instrument for his demands.  The necks on the Ibz SG basses are great but they are too thin for such unusually high tensions.  He may require a MUCH sturdier neck through design. Those basses have to be strong to put up with prog metal's constant barrage of simplistic machine gun tonic eight notes (;

Good luck with this,

Paul