'FREE' acoustic guitar 'steam neck reset' experiment Pt1 скачать в хорошем качестве

'FREE' acoustic guitar 'steam neck reset' experiment Pt1

Ok. Haters gonna hate. But before you do: please note that in this experiment, I am simply using a donated and unplayable old guitar to TEST claims made by other guitar luthiers / techs. What is this claim? That with heat, steam and clamping force you can 're-set' the neck on your tired old acoustic guitar to make it playable once again. It's my experience that the playing action on many acoustic guitars increases over the years under constant string loading as the neck rotates around the neck joint. In short, the headstock end rises up and the fingerboard extension end sinks into the top. As this occurs, the once-vertical side wall of the guitar (at the upper bout) flexes outwards at the bottom and inwards at the top. The implicit claim of this 'Free neck reset' is that steam, heat and clamping pressure can reverse the deformation that has led to the rising action and do so more or less usefully and permanently. I'm skeptical. I don't think we're 'bending wood' in the traditional sense that woodworkers understand; rather we're re-deforming a box structure - a shape whose strength depends on the right angled kerfing that holds the two flat planes together all around its structure. Seems to me that if we're deforming the structure once more BACK towards its original configuration then we're doing it by softening the grip of that kerfing to a point where we can rotate the neck back (around that pivot point on the guitar's upper bout). The problem I have is that IF this process achieves this re-deformation then it does so by 'weakening' the same box structure that wasn't strong enough to resist the string loading in the first place. But I refuse to reach a conclusion on something like this without at least conducting an experiment myself - and that's what I'm doing. If this looks like a very un-scientific and crude (even cavalier) method please don't blame me - blame the original proponents of this method. Nowhere do those proponents share any technical specs to work to; no steam quantities, no time guidelines, no bend distances required vs. 'snap back' and no real guide to how many times or how long this process should go on. No idea how or when to conclude that you've reached the end point either. So I'm working in the dark which doesn't give me much confidence to use this technique on anything but an inexpensive and already unplayable guitar - assuming we end up with something playable at the end of it. Whether we DO or not will be revealed in Part 2 of this video. If it HAS become playable (unwanted side-effects notwithstanding) then Part 3 will be a 'check-in' a few months down the line to see how quickly the action might change 'post-FREE-steam-neck-reset'.