Ended up with a bad Rickenbacker 330

[collin]

And they can sometimes get bent out of shape rapidly as well...

ain't THAT the truth. Good one, CJ!

[jingle_jangle]

What I neglected to elaborate on, which wood have clarified things:

Unpredictability leads to, in this case, a piece of wood having been cut from a tree, and ending up very soft and twisty, whereas the piece of wood next to it would have been perfectly fine, and there being no reasonable way to predict that one piece would not hold up well as a neck blank, while the other would be just fine for decades.

So, there will be a tiny minority of guitars with necks prone to twist or bend in a short time, and no way to tell until they would have been placed into service.

So, generally you won't have to keep readjusting the neck once it's dialed in, unless you made a change to strings that were higher tension or lower tension in a major way. Occasionally, there will be adjustments that are necessitated by changes in humidity or temperature or both. But there are no hard and fast rules on this.

Im curious Paul. Is there some sort of accepted standard for aging/drying wood before a guitar is made. Is kiln drying or just aging a better method. How long is best?
I also wonder, is the older the wood, the less likely it will be that things like this will happen? In other words, is a new guitar neck more susecptable to this kind of defect devoloping, over say a 10, or 20 year old guitar? Or is it just "wood" and who knows?
I understand that wild climate changes also may be a factor, but if a guitar or bass neck is good for 10 years or so, and not subjected to said wild climate changes is it generally thought that it will not twist?
Thanks.

There is an accepted standard, but I'm not sure exactly what RIC use as a standard. 6% moisture content is generally regarded as ideal. I've bought wood for acoustics that was as high as 22% and needed to be settled in for several months to bring it down, and I've gotten other tonewood that was at 2%, which went into my storage container up in Sonoma County for over a year before I used it.

Obviously, the body of a solid-bodied lump like a Tele is not so sensitive to moisture content, but the minute you deal with neck woods and the forces upon them, or begin building an acoustic or archtop guitar, moisture content becomes critical.

The best wood is in old guitars that have been played regularly. Tone DOES improve with playing, and it can also deteriorate.

This unpredictability is a characteristic of woods. I've seen 3-year-old premium Martins that need cleating and neck resets, simply because they had an unlucky and unpredictable combination of materials, climate, and playing styles.

[Rickygirl]

Wood's an organic material, and, like most women (also organic material, except for Aguillera, Lohan, and Michelle Malkin), occasionally are soft and unpredictable.

Wow, are we really?? What an interesting description.

[jingle_jangle]

Not a complete description, to be sure...

[whojamfan]

Yes, the bike does pedal in reverse