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People on forums tend to say that the most stable wood for neck is mahogany or any kind of laminated woods and that maple is warping like a bitch. Have you ever had any problems with your maple necks or maybe heard about? How they usually react to climate changes?

sunshiner wrote:Have you ever had any problems with your maple necks?

Nope. We don't really have extreme changes in temperature/humidity here in the UK though.

i'm not going to answer your question directly because i dont know.

but if two different necks (different woods, lets say) are subject to damp to dry, and excessive heat and cold variations for long enoguh they will both warp and fuck up. if they are kept in a good environment they will both not warp and fuck up

people will probably say "but actually maple is a solid lump of wood so is theoretically stronger", or "2 pieces of wood are stronger" or some other piece of theorycraft like that. its all postulating.

the truth is all guitar necks can fuck up in the right condition and you will likely never experience that middle ground area where you'd be kicking yourself that you bought a maple one instead of a mahogany one.

so i guess the moral is to look after your guitars and its not even a consideration.

i have had two. both were figured maple necks, one was a 60's villager neck with a broken truss rod. the other was a 10 year old squier p-bass with a bit of burl looking action going on around the third fret. it was odd. almost spalted.

In my direct experience, maple is by far the best neck wood. Everything warps, cracks, and can break, but most neck repairs are done on mahogany (or for hack jobs done with saws). I like the idea of mahogany bodies with maple necks, too. I have seen that done with Fender, Gibson, Rickenbacker, and BC Rich.

What I have seen online would support my experience, however we can't know under what conditions the guitars have been kept. It's not completely fair to judge between set and bolt, either. Bolt necks can be removed, adjusted, and fixed more easily, which can reduce stress to the wood. But after sixty years of guitar making, I think Fender has less to be concerned with.

Are there any kind of estimates for production numbers in that time? I would guess that Fender out-produces Gibson.

I would think it's mostly reliant on the cut of the wood and quality. Fancy stuff like burl and what have you, means that it'll likely be more unstable. You basically want the grain running as close to vertical along the wood. I'd say a lot of mahogany neck breaks happen because they are made in one piece and the grain runs short at the neck. Also most mahogany necks are angled which when dropped would more likely hit the top end and snap it. Most maple necks I've seen are barely quarter cut and I would have thought this would be prone to twisting but never had any problems myself?

Yeah, you can't always go by what the wood technically is. The toughest necks I've encountered were maple ones on intermediate/high-end Fenders. The flimsiest necks I've encountered were maple on knock-off Strats and Squier Affinities.