A normal Fender style neck is made of one peice of flatsawn wood. It is optimised for ease of manufacturing because flatsawn wood machines around the edges without chipping. Unfortunately is is the least stable orientation and if it statrs to move, it will tend to twist basswards causing buzzes aroung the treble 12th fret region and bass 7th fret region. Ibanez and Fender often have this problem to some degree.
Quarter sawn neck wood is better as it is naturally more stable and if it does move, will usually do so in a way that the truss rod can deal with. Gibson and PRS do this.
The way I make necks is a lamination of 2 or 3 peices in a radial grain orientation with a quarter sawn fretboard. This is like adding lateral stability to the quartersawn neck and is about as good as a wooden neck gets without adding carbon fibre. Most of the premium boutique makers do this, and many thru neck basses have been like this for years. Some common brands (Ibanez etc) have started to do this, but they still don't get the grain orientations right every time.
A custom made neck also gives you the opportunity to minimise the neck heel, perfect the shape, choose inlays, frets, finish, head shape etc.
Its not exactly the poor student edition though!!
And despite the shortcomings of the Fender developed method, it has worked fine for over 50 years. There's always room for improvement though
So Ash can you please gimme an esitmate for that body. I want the jack on the side like on a tele, it needs to be able to fit a tele neck, I want SSH configuration (even though I ain't putting a mid pu in) and I would like it in Sunburst finish, matt if you can otherwise I will just sand it. Oh yeah and swamp ash wood. Thanks.
