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Tag Archives: truss rod

Side rebate planes

Stanley made two side rebate planes, numbered 98 and 99, which were mirror images of each other, designed to cut either the left or right vertical sides of a channel or dado. I found one in a secondhand tool a long time ago, and then spent years looking for its opposite number.

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While searching, I came across other designs of side rebate planes some of which ingeniously incorporated the ability to cut on left and right sides in a single tool. They’re attractive little devices and I struggled to resist buying them.

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However, side rebate planes have two defects. The first is that the blades are hard to sharpen. It’s crucially important to maintain the exact angle of the cutting edge relative to the long axis of the blade because there’s no capacity for adjustment in the plane itself. Get it wrong and the blade cuts only the top or bottom.

The second defect is rather more serious: even sharpened and set up properly, they’re useless. I mean that literally: it’s not that these planes don’t work but that problems they could solve or jobs they could make easier never seem to crop up.

At least that’s what I thought until a couple of weeks ago when I found that a truss rod that I was installing into a guitar neck was a whisker too fat to enter the groove that I had routed. I could have got the router out again, but a side rebate plane provided a quicker and easier solution. A few passes and the truss rod was a nice snug fit.

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Of course, I’ve been writing about my own experience. Other woodworkers may find side rebate planes so handy that they like keep a pair on the back of the bench. If so, I hope they’ll comment and describe the tasks they use them for.

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Truss rod experiments

Having established, to my own satisfaction at least, that it would be asking for trouble to make a steel string guitar without a truss rod, the next question was which type to use and whether to arrange to get access to it at the top of the neck or the heel.

My friend Peter Barton, who makes beautiful steel string guitars in Yorkshire, recommended the Hotrod, which is a 2 way adjustable truss rod available from Stewart-MacDonald and looks like this.

But there were a couple of reasons why I had misgivings about this device. One was that it weighs over 100g and I thought it might make a small or medium sized instrument too heavy in the neck. The other was that it’s 11 mm deep and, although it would be easy to rout a deep enough slot to accommodate it, there wouldn’t be room to glue a fillet over it. The top of the slot would have to be covered by the bottom of the fingerboard and I worried that, when the rod was tightened up it might split the fingerboard or cause a bump.

To check, I made a model guitar neck out of a scrap of softwood, routed out a slot, installed the hotrod, glued on a pine ‘fingerboard’ and tightened up the trussrod as hard as I could.

It worked fine. My anxieties were unfounded: no splits or bulges in the fingerboard, even though it was made of nothing more substantial than cheap pine, and I could put a curve in the neck in either direction.

Still, there’s no getting away from that fact that it’s heavy.

An alternative, which is less than half the weight of a hotrod, is a simple tension rod. This what’s recommended by Jonathan Kinkead in his book Build your own Acoustic Guitar (ISBN 0-634-05463-5), where he gives instructions how to make and install it. I liked this idea because of its simplicity and light weight, and because it’s easy to arrange to adjust it through the soundhole, which means that there’s no need to excavate the headstock to provide access to the nut.

If you go for this solution, you have to find a way to anchor the rod at the top of the neck. Kinkead recommends a metal dowel tapped to receive the threaded end of the rod. I made one out of silver steel and repeated the earlier experiment.

It’s easy to install, although it’s important to judge the depth of the hole for the dowel accurately to avoid drilling right through the neck.

And it seemed to work OK too, although obviously it’s only able to bend the neck in one direction. However, when I took the fingerboard off, this is what I saw.

The fixing at the top end of the neck had been pulled out of its cavity and had begun to travel down the neck. Of course, this experimental neck is made of softwood and the problem might be less severe in a real mahogany neck. Even so, I thought there had to be a better solution.

It was the shape that was wrong. The cylindrical nut had acted a bit like a wedge. When I made a rectangular shaped nut out of mild steel, it stayed put.

As you can see, the first nut was unnecessarily wide. A narrower version worked just as well.

That’s what I decided to use in this guitar: a tension rod made of 5mm studding, anchored at the top of the neck with a square nut and adjusted through the soundhole. The nut at the top of the neck was silver soldered to the studding to prevent it moving during any adjustments at the lower end. Tension in the rod is controlled by turning a 5mm column hex nut bearing on a substantial washer at its lower end.

This arrangement worked well in the finished instrument and was more than powerful enough to keep the neck straight against the pull of the strings. Next time I make a steel string guitar, I shall be tempted to use 4mm studding instead of 5mm, which would mean even less weight in the neck.

Thinking about truss rods

As you’ll have gathered from my last post, I’ve been making a steel string guitar recently. That’s something I hadn’t done for a long time, and it got me thinking about truss rods. One puzzle is how they got their name. Doesn’t the word truss conjure up something like the Forth bridge or the roof structure of this magnificent medieval tithe barn¹?

Wikipedia says that, used in an engineering context, a truss is a structure comprising one or more triangular units constructed with straight members whose ends are connected at joints referred to as nodes. So it’s surely an exaggeration to call a rod in the neck of a guitar a truss. Still, it’s not seriously misleading and I expect that most readers will think I’m quibbling.

Another puzzle surrounds the purpose they serve. As far as I know, no classical guitar maker finds them necessary. So why is it that steel string guitar makers never build a guitar without one? The straightforward answer is that steel strings exert more tension when tuned up to pitch than nylon strings and that a truss rod is necessary to counteract this extra force.

But I wondered if this explanation really held water. Using information provided by d’Addario, a reasonable estimate of the combined tension of 6 nylon guitar strings is about 40 kgs, while 6 steel strings exert nearly double that at 70kg. A load of 70 kgs certainly sounds a lot – the weight of an adult man – but don’t forget that it’s acting at a mechanical disadvantage when it comes to bending or breaking the neck of a guitar. The pull is only a few degrees away from parallel to the neck’s longitudinal axis and the compressive forces will be substantially greater than the bending forces.

Using simple beam theory, I made some rough calculations to get a sense of how much the string tension of a steel string guitar would bend the neck. These calculations didn’t attempt to take the taper of the neck into account – I simply pretended that the dimensions of the neck at the first fret remained constant all the way along the neck until it joined the body of the guitar – and they ignored the fact that the fingerboard and the neck are of different woods that have different material properties. (More details of the calculation are given at the end of this post in a footnote, if anyone is interested enough to check².)

The answer turned out to be that, tuned up to pitch, string tension would deflect the nut end of the neck about 1.6 mm forwards of its unloaded position. Although this is bound to be an over-estimate (because the calculation neglected the stiffening effect of the fingerboard and the increasing dimensions of the neck as it descends), I was surprised how large the deflection was. And I wondered if I’d got something seriously wrong. To check, I made a primitive model of a guitar neck to make some actual measurements. As you can see in the photographs below, the experimental neck is smaller in cross section than a real neck but it’s modelled realistically with an angled headstock and nut. Loaded with a 14lb weight, I measured a deflection of 1.47 mm at the nut, which compared fairly well with a theoretical value of 1.26mm derived using the dimensions of the model neck. So I’m moderately confident that my calculations for a real guitar neck aren’t too far out.

It looks as if the obvious answer is at least partly right. You almost certainly do need a truss rod to counteract the bending effect of string tension on the neck of a steel string guitar.

I suspect there’s another reason for truss rods too, and that is to prevent creep. Wood that bears a constant load for a long period tends to deform gradually even when the load is far short of its breaking strain. This is the reason why the ridges of old roofs tend to sag in the middle. In his book, Structures, J E Gordon explains that it’s also the reason why the Ancient Greeks took the wheels off their chariots at night. The wheels were lightly built with only 4 spokes and a thin wooden rim. If left standing still for too long, the wheels became elliptical in shape.

So perhaps I’ve ended up proving something that most guitar makers knew already. However, I don’t feel that the exercise has been a complete waste of time. Musical instruments shouldn’t contain anything that isn’t either necessary or beautiful. Since truss rods certainly don’t fit into the latter category, it’s good to know that they qualify for the former.

Footnotes

1. Thanks to Kirsty Hall for the image of the tithe barn.

2. Details of calculation of neck deflection.

Neck: width = 44mm; depth = 21.5mm; length (to 14th fret) = 355mm
Force exerted by string tension = 700 N
Nut taken as being 8mm above centroid of neck
To work out the area moment of inertia, I assumed that the neck was semi-elliptical in cross section and that the neutral axis ran through the centroid.
Modulus of elasticity of the neck was taken as 10,000 MPa.
Deflection was calculated as Ml²/2EI, where M = moment exerted by strings at the nut, l = length of neck to neck/body join, E = modulus of elasticity of material of neck (taken as 10,000 Mpa) and I = area moment of inertia of neck (assumed to be a half ellipse).

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