Cold weather and truss rods

Gear
#1

we have been having a cold spell over the last few weeks and today I picked up my guitar and noticed my action felt different. I measured it and sure enough it was a bit higher than I like it. I checked my neck relief and, just as I suspected it, the neck has shifted slightly.

I’m wondering - when you’re having a cold or hot spell, do you wait until your weather returns to what is normal for your country, or do you adjust your truss there and then?

It’s 0c today, but it’s to warm up to 10c tomorrow and the rest of next week we will get warmer weather. Will this warmer weather undo these changes to the truss rod…?

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#2

I’m in Canada so…routine seasonal weather changes are expected. Adjust the truss rod as needed. I find generally twice a year (beginning of winter, beginning of summer) then as needed additionally. Imho I don’t think 10 degrees will make a significant enough difference to need to adjust the truss rod based on the result of temp changes alone. May be other reasons tho. I used to really get my instrument out of wack playing with truss adjustments but have learned to make small ‘quarter turn at a time’ changes.

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#3

Thanks Thegent.

I got this guitar (ESP M-II) a few months ago and it has been rock solid so far.

I will maybe just stick some new strings on and then give my guitar a complete set up then. It’s been about 3 or 4 months since my last string change :grimacing:

#4

Non-stop setup issues from all the humidity changes, which is I think what really causes the problem more so than the temperature. Cold air contains little water and when heated just becomes parched relative humidity-wise, sucking everything dry.

The studio is basically a sealed box, and we run a humidifier that keeps things at 40% around the clock. Because the box is so sealed we only need to refill once every week or so. Setup issues disappeared when we started doing this. You can come back weeks later and all the guitars are in tune and nothing has moved in terms of setup. If only the house was as properly insulated / sealed.

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#5

How much water do you have to put into your humidifier every week? A few litres I’m guessing?

Did you find you had to make any bridge adjustments, or were you just making truss rod adjustments?

#6

This is the one we have:

https://www.amazon.com/AIRCARE-MA1201-Whole-House-Console-Style-Evaporative/dp/B004S34ISA

In the studio it lasts a week or more on one refill and easily keeps things at 40%. At home, I refill this more than twice per day, and it barely reaches 30% on really cold days. It’s a super old house that may as well have giant holes in the walls it’s so drafty.

The guitars we use most often are these old 60s models and for whatever reason they have either straight or back-bow necks, maybe due to age and drying. The necks can still have too little relief even with the truss rods completely loose — so no further adjustment is even possible. The only option is too keep the humidity correct or the strings will buzz. More so on some strings than others, which is maddening and maybe due to other fretboard issues or fret-leveling issues. Maybe a Plek or something is in order.

If you have room on your truss rod to tighten or loosen, or if you have a two-way truss rod, then you’re golden.

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#7

Yeah, this is 100% a humidity and not temperature thing, and here in New England seasonal tweaks are kind of a fact of life.

I will say that thicker necks tend to be a bit more stable than thinner ones, and unfinished/oil finished necks less stable than ones with an impermeable finish (my main player for years was a RG7620 that I sanded and tung oiled the back of the neck, which felt great, but made it shift noticably more with the weather). It’s not an exact science though.

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