Hot on the tail of the recent thread on this rod I just had a failure of the two way Blanchard designed Allied rod. This was one of a batch of 10 I bought in late 2011. It was tested as I always do by putting the butt end in a vise and cranking it both ways several times. It was installed with a filler strip.
The rod was installed on an archtop with carbon fiber reinforcement and worked well during neck leveling and all seemed OK until I was doing final setup just prior to going out. I usually need very little tension on the rod because of the neck reinforcement but during a little tweak there was a crack and the rod became non functional.
Because it's easy for me to do I took an X ray and saw the break at the distal weld. Since this was a headstock adjustable rod I drilled and tapped the allen nut and was able to get it about a third of the way out with a slaphammer, and the rest of the way with a visegrip. I thought maybe I could tap a new one in without removing the fretboard but it was too tight and I had to remove the board.
I made a surrogate neck as shown on the Allied web site and tested the remaining rods, two broke at the weld. One at each end. I talked to Allied and there may have been some bad rods out there. Apparently the new ones are much better. Bottom line, if you are using this rod be sure to test it aggressively as shown on the Allied website. If any question on the welds don't use it. I love the rod but I'll admit I'm a little scared to use another one. It really sucks to have to remove a fretboard on a newly finished guitar especially an archtop.
