Warmoth Quality Issues?

[Bassistlaw]

Oops my bad! I use this type of double truss rod with the nut welded on for my own “from scratch” builds. It works both ways!

 

[CrabCakes7]

An update for anyone who's interested. Unfortunately, not really any good news.

It's been roughly 4 weeks since the first neck was sent back and I haven't heard anything so I gave Warmoth a call. Joe is the CS rep who's been helping me with this thus far.

In short, outside of an initial assessment, the neck hasn't been worked on yet and they were unable to provide a rough ETA for when it might be fixed. The neck originally only took 2 weeks to be received from when it was originally ordered (showroom item) so that was disappointing to hear. I had hoped that resolving issues with preexisting orders would take priority in their workflow but I was corrected that that is not the case. They recommended I follow up every two weeks until work is complete. Not thrilled about that but it is what it is.

On a more concerning note, when we got around to talking about the backbow in the first neck they said that they didn't find any when they checked it. To be blunt, that was utterly baffling for me to hear because the amount of backbow present in the neck wasn't at all subtle or hard to find. I'd even sent them photos of gauged measruements demonstrating the issue and they refused to acknowledge any of it. They just kept saying things like the "neck is fine" or the "truss rod is in good working order" (which isn't at all the issue here) and that the neck was only marked down as being in for fretwork fixes and that was it. They otherwise completely stonewalled me on it. The only thing that caused them to pause and backpedal a bit is when I asked for them to send me a photo of the neck with a notched straight edge on it, showing me that it was either flat or had some amount of forward bow, at which point the excuses started pouring out.

Unfortnately, the call ended without them agreeing to any concrete action. Just that I could send it back again if it still has issues. They weren't even willing to say that they'd check it again just in case.

So I'm betting I'm going to receive it back with the exact same issue. Absolutely wild to me.

 

[Rick]

If you still have issues after you get it back,bring it to your local tech who works on guitars for a living. Get his sincere opinion and solutions.

 

[NutBehindTheGuitar]

Unfortnately, the call ended without them agreeing to any concrete action. Just that I could send it back again if it still has issues. They weren't even willing to say that they'd check it again just in case.

Well that is very distressing. I recently ordered and received in late December 2024 a custom neck. It seems fine to me although I haven't put it on a guitar yet, so fingers crossed.

I remember a long time ago, talking to a guy who owned a mail order business (that's when it was called "mail order" and not "OnLine") he emphasized to me that the primary obstacle to mail order sales was the customer anxiety about dealing with a shop that they couldn't see and touch, and their concern that they would be stuck with defective merchandise and have no recourse. That's why he always had a no questions return policy.

He said that when a customer returned something and got their money back no hassle, invariably they would order again.

He also knew from prior experience in brick-and-mortar retail, that it was the unhappy customers who tended to talk.

Hopefully Warmoth will do right by you.

 

[CrabCakes7]

If you still have issues after you get it back,bring it to your local tech who works on guitars for a living. Get his sincere opinion and solutions.

I mean no disrespect but I am a "local tech". I don't do this as my primary source of income but I do work on guitars in a professional capacity. There absolutely are limits to my knowledge and abilities but I do what know I'm doing here.

That being said, there's really only 2 ways to address a backbowed neck if the truss rod can't be used to remedy the problem:

1.) You can pull all the frets and re-plane/re-radius the fretboard to be flat with the neck as-is.

2.) You can attempt to warp the neck back into proper orientation with a combination of heat/steam and pressure, i.e. using a heat press.

Option #1 is a significant amount of work and will noticably change the profile of the neck due to the amount of material that will need to be removed to fix the issue.

Option #2 is a gamble that has no guarantee of fixing the problem and may even make it worse. There's no way to know how the neck will react before trying it and there's no going back once you do.

All that aside, this is a brand new neck with a clear cut manufacturing defect. Warmoth has all the pictures and measurements documenting the problem. There's no reason any of that should even be a part of the conversation. At the end of the day the crux of the issue is that I paid Warmoth for a reasonably defect-free product and they either owe me that at no additional cost to myself or they owe me my money back.. How they've handled the situation this far is completely shameful in my opinion.

 

[CrabCakes7]

Update for anyone following along

I received the third and last neck from my earlier orders and unfortunately it's also no good.

The neck has a pretty significant S-shape to it, with large humps in the fretboard at the 1st and 12th~14th frets and hollow valleys in between. So the fretboard either wasn't leveled properly before the frets were installed or the neck warped at some point during manufacturing.

I've attached a couple photos for anyone who's curious. This example is bad enough that you can pretty easily see it by eye by looking down the neck at the fret ends (pic 1, straight line added for reference in pic 2). The hump is about as tall as the frets are (pic 3) so this isn't something that can be solved with fret leveling since there wouldn't be enough material. The only real fix at this point is to pull the frets and re-level the board.

So we're unfortunately 0/3 on necks. I called them today about this one and have not yet heard back, so I'll follow-up tomorrow.

I have not yet received Neck #1 (backbowed neck) or Neck #2 (frets not seated properly) but the last update I received from Warmoth on those was that Neck #1 was scrapped and is being replaced and Neck #2 is being refretted.

 

[BroccoliRob]

beep beep all aboard the exaggeration station. my friend, i implore you to type "fender neck hump" into your favorite search engine. it's just a thing with bolt on guitars

my second guitar was a 1985 peavey t60. well, I'm pretty sure. i don't remember exactly if it was a t60 or a Blazer II, cause of the passage of time and other things, but it was acquired from one of my Unc's (short for uncle, which is like a special name we give brothers of dad's and mom's for some reason).

anyway, it had a hump like this but it was okay. I had a guy in town level it in exchange for a small terrarium I acquired at our local Tip. those last few upper frets being a little low actually acted as fall-away after he was done. they called me Miles Shredsworth after that. not really, that was a joke, I know the Ace Attorney games didn't exist back then.

They called me shredward r murrow.

oh I should probably explain what a Tip is (different from when you give service people money in exchanges for the services they rendered)

A ‘tip’ in St Louis is called a ‘dump’ in the rest of America apparently. it's a big area where people take their unwanted junk and ‘tip’ it in. our tip was a big hole in the ground a few miles outside the city limits. every six months, the hole was backfilled with dirt and a new hole dug nearby. the hole-filling was would be announced in the community paper (not one of the major city papers, though, we wanted to keep it on the DL because it might have technically been illegal) three days prior to the event, to give everyone time to go to the tip and scavenge. you never knew what you might find but it was always exciting. one time I scored a leather jacket with a picture of a cobra on the back.

Tip Day was a family event and, people set up grills; kind of like a tailgate party but for a dirty swap meet: you didn’t just drag something out of the hole and leave, see, people walked around and said things like, 'nice bookcase, I’ll swap you a terrarium for it' which is how I got the terrarium. our family dining table and four mismatched chairs were also from the tip. It wasn’t uncommon to visit someone’s house and declare 'hey, that used to be mine, but it looks great in here' Tip Day was eventually cancelled due to safety concerns. the day I got the terrarium a girl from my school fell into the hole and skewered herself on a pink flamingo. she was okay but the media attention kinda killed the event and we all resented her for it.

 

[teleme01]

Was the flamingo saved? Inquiring minds, you know

 

[BroccoliRob]

it was one of those lawn plastic flamingos with the metal stick legs. took metal stick through a lung when she fell in the Tip. she's okay just doesn't breathe too good. I wanted to visit her in the hospital but I wasn’t allowed to because my pops and Mr Hatcher didn’t get along. about a year prior, they’d had a fight during Tip Day over a set of golf clubs. Mr Hatcher got the bag and most of the clubs, my dad kept a putter and a wedge out of spite. Oh, and neither even played golf - there wasn’t even a golf course in our area at the time, but that wasn’t the point. the point was that my dad saw the golf clubs first and called dibs. I heard the dibs story about three-hundred times over the next few years.

 

[Rick]

You need to go get a second opinion from someone who works on guitars as a profession. People do it all the time ... don't be bashful.

 

[Ribspare]

Every new guitar I get, I take it to a pro and get it pleked or fret level. I typically ask him to inspect it. Since I don’t have microscopic eyes, I just let the expert make his decisions

 

[CrabCakes7]

Final update for those still following along now that everything has been resolved.

Neck #1 was returned to Warmoth due to having a backbow and was replaced with a similarly spec'd neck. That replacement neck was finished with incorrect specs so it was replaced with another similarly spec'd neck. That neck was received in excellent condition and plays extremely well after your typical fret level and dress.

Neck #2 was returned to Warmoth due to fret install issues and was sent back to me after being repaired. The repair however was done improperly and they took it back again and ultimately fully refunded it after inspecting the repair.

Neck #3 was either warped or the fretboard was improperly leveled when it was made. Took it to a local luthier (friend of mine who I used to do contract work for) and he said the same thing I did: the deviation in the fretsboard's surface was too great and that you couldn't level it as is without running out of material on some of the frets. I really did like this neck so I ended up pulling the frets and replaning the fretboard myself. Ultimately needed to remove around 45 thousandths of maternal at the 14th fret to make the neck flat. To put that into perspective, if I had tried to level the frets as the neck originally was, the 14th fret would have been 0.002" tall best case scenario, which is thinner than a piece of paper. After fixing it, cutting new fret slots, and reinstalling new frets, it plays like a dream.

All in all my whole experience with Warmoth was pretty lackluster. The bodies I received were all great and I'd highly recommend those but the necks were fairly poor quality overall. I usually work on about 5-10 guitars a week and I don't even really see issues like these on $200-300 budget instruments (Squires, various flavors of MIM, MIC, MII budget instruments) let alone $500-600 necks.

That being said, Warmoth CS did ultimately take care of me at the end of the day but it was a fairly long-winded process.

 

[F Holes]

I'm glad the OP feels that Warmoth at least 'made him whole.'

I just wanted to correct what I believe is some misinformation regarding the compound radius and the straight edge. With a compound radius on a fretboard, you either have to vary the thickness along the centerline, or vary the thickness along the fretboard edges - it's simple geometry since the fretboard width is fixed.

Another way to put it: To turn a 10" radius into a 16" radius, you have to sand down the center of the fretboard until the radius sander meets the board at the edges.

I did a mock-up of a 10" and 16" radius, keeping the thickness the same at the fret ends (by the E-e strings). The difference in thickness in the center is 0.023". So the fretboard of a compound radius will be 0.023" thinner in the center, between the D-G strings, at the pickup end.

The height of a 6105 fret above the fretboard is 0.059". The OP's straight edge shows a gap of a little more than half the height of the fret, so .023" is pretty close to that. I'm sure there is some tolerance in the sanding and possibly in the way the straight edge is being used on a curved surface.

In my own experience I've learned that the slotted straight edge is just a reference point. Ultimately we measure string to fret height for setups, and there's almost always some variation between how the frets were fit and sanded versus the plane of the fretboard.

 

[CrabCakes7]

I'm glad the OP feels that Warmoth at least 'made him whole.'

I just wanted to correct what I believe is some misinformation regarding the compound radius and the straight edge. With a compound radius on a fretboard, you either have to vary the thickness along the centerline, or vary the thickness along the fretboard edges - it's simple geometry since the fretboard width is fixed.

Another way to put it: To turn a 10" radius into a 16" radius, you have to sand down the center of the fretboard until the radius sander meets the board at the edges.

I did a mock-up of a 10" and 16" radius, keeping the thickness the same at the fret ends (by the E-e strings). The difference in thickness in the center is 0.023". So the fretboard of a compound radius will be 0.023" thinner in the center, between the D-G strings, at the pickup end.

The height of a 6105 fret above the fretboard is 0.059". The OP's straight edge shows a gap of a little more than half the height of the fret, so .023" is pretty close to that. I'm sure there is some tolerance in the sanding and possibly in the way the straight edge is being used on a curved surface.

In my own experience I've learned that the slotted straight edge is just a reference point. Ultimately we measure string to fret height for setups, and there's almost always some variation between how the frets were fit and sanded versus the plane of the fretboard.

The neck being referenced in the photo had a straight 16" radius.

 

[BroccoliRob]

I just wanted to correct what I believe is some misinformation regarding the compound radius and the straight edge. With a compound radius on a fretboard, you either have to vary the thickness along the centerline, or vary the thickness along the fretboard edges - it's simple geometry since the fretboard width is fixed.

Another way to put it: To turn a 10" radius into a 16" radius, you have to sand down the center of the fretboard until the radius sander meets the board at the edges.

wouldn't it be very, very, very bad if the Big W sanded down the middle of the fingerboard to get the 16" at the end? the string heights on the middle strings would be a disaster, let alone fretting something made that way. u definitely want the center of the FB to be consistent thickness, so I think they vary the edges, allowing them to "Come Up" to create that flatter surface at the higher frets. it's the only thing that makes sense

 

[sdeeg]

I just wanted to correct what I believe is some misinformation regarding the compound radius and the straight edge. With a compound radius on a fretboard, you either have to vary the thickness along the centerline, or vary the thickness along the fretboard edges - it's simple geometry since the fretboard width is fixed.

The width of a fretboard is not fixed. The taper and increase in string spread is actually the whole reason to use a compound radius (aka conical section) instead of a cylinder. But either way, the "crown" of a conical section (or cylinder) is absolutely, 100% a straight line. This is all just high school level geometry, cuboids (the initial tapered fretboard) sliced by cones, but I'm not so sure I'd call it simple. I have a BS in Physics, so hard math problems are kinda my jam, and this stuff makes my head hurt.

I did a mock-up of a 10" and 16" radius, keeping the thickness the same at the fret ends (by the E-e strings). The difference in thickness in the center is 0.023". So the fretboard of a compound radius will be 0.023" thinner in the center, between the D-G strings, at the pickup end.

The way you've set up the problem you are correct that it's thinner toward the end defining the larger radius, but there is still no curve in the center line because it tapers down evenly. It's a straight line that you can put a straight edge on. In this case the line is just no longer parallel to the back.

In my own experience I've learned that the slotted straight edge is just a reference point. Ultimately we measure string to fret height for setups, and there's almost always some variation between how the frets were fit and sanded versus the plane of the fretboard.

For sure, you're completely right. The only surface that really matters is the one created by the tops of the frets. In theory the top of the fretboard can be as crazy as you want and little variations can be dealt with in leveling. But the OPs case is one where the frets (and the nut) would have to be massively different in order to define a proper surface.

wouldn't it be very, very, very bad if the Big W sanded down the middle of the fingerboard to get the 16" at the end? the string heights on the middle strings would be a disaster, let alone fretting something made that way. u definitely want the center of the FB to be consistent thickness, so I think they vary the edges, allowing them to "Come Up" to create that flatter surface at the higher frets. it's the only thing that makes sense

It's all a matter of angles, what you're looking for, and how you compensate for things, but I checked my canary neck I recently got and eyeballing it with calipers the fretboard sides at the nut end look slightly thinner. There's a lot of angles and curves going on, but it suggests to me that they let the edges do what they will and make sure the crown of the fretboard is parallel with the surface it's glued to (and also parallel to the heel). This way you get a nice straight line parallel to the body heading to the bridge without having to do a bunch of compensation.