I always dreaded re-setting the neck on a guitar.  On acoustic guitars this meant major surgery of one type or another. 

The high-brow reset on dovetail jointed necks involved first separating the fingerboard from the face of the guitar with a warm spatula, of course without scratching anything in a deplorable and unsightly manner. Then the 15th fret had to be pulled out, and a wee little hole drilled down under it into the space between the back of the dovetail and the neck block. Then the real fun began. 

A kettle of water was boiled and the steam captured and squirted down into that little hole with hoses and home-made syringe designs in a manner reminiscent of some self-taught, pre-historic, and likely fatal blood transfusion. The idea was that the steam would soften up the glue in the neck joint enough so you could lift the dovetail right out and work on it to reset the neck. What really happened was that the steam seemed to always want to condense into water just about the time it was getting to that wee little hole, making the whole apparatus hiss and gurgle and form a puddle on the bench.  The trick was you had to hold the guitar with your right hand, manipulate the gurgling steam/water hypodermic with your left, all while wracking the neck around with your third arm, loosening up the neck joint and letting the steam get in deeper. 

Amazingly, just before the guitar fell apart from being underwater so long, the neck dovetail would come loose and slide out, which was a great relief. At this point I was always sure that some god-awful water damage had been done to the guitar, but it actually cleaned up pretty well with some paper towels, and the neck and body were left to dry overnight. 

The fun of actually re-setting the neck was left for the next day, when the dovetail surfaces would be shimmed and filed and tweaked and re-shimmed and re-filed and swore at some more until it could finally all be glued back together, of course without scratching anything in a deplorable and unsightly manner. And there went your weekend.

The alternative low-brow neck reset method used on less expensive instruments was simpler but left scars. The procedure involved first separating the binding from the back of the guitar around the upper bout using an X-Acto knife, and then razor-sawing through the glue seam between the guitar’s back and the bottom of the neck block. If you were lucky, the razor saw blade would stay on the glue seam and not wander up and suddenly break through the surface of the back like a miniature flat metal whale breaching. 

Once the whole glue seam was cut through, the neck angle could be very easily set where you wanted it just by bending the neck back and gluing the saw wound closed.  After the glue dried, there was now an overhanging strip of the front edge of the back that had to be trimmed and filed off to allow the binding to be re-glued in place. By this point you had pretty much given up on avoiding scratching anything in a deplorable and unsightly manner. 

The final signature scar of this neck reset method was a half-inch gap between the ends of the two pieces of binding after they were re-glued. When the neck angle was changed, the whole front of the guitar was warped into a new shape that now had a half-inch longer perimeter around the front, and the binding just didn’t reach around anymore. This neck reset method had the advantage of only using up half of your weekend.

At some point I decided that neck re-sets should be made illegal. As this would be difficult to enforce, the next best solution was to design a guitar such that the concept of neck-reset had no more meaning than a buggy whip in a Corvette. 

The Ridgewing neck is held in place by the strings’ tension, with micrometer threaded adjustable set screws in the neck pocket controlling the overall neck length and string height. The set screw for adjusting the neck angle is accessed through a little hole in the fingerboard between the 20^th and 21^st frets and between the G- and D-strings that looks like a little piece of inlay fell out. This allows the neck angle to be actively and precisely adjusted while the guitar is being played, which is nice. The equivalent of a neck reset becomes just a little tweak you do unconsciously while tuning the strings and clearing your throat before singing a song, as Harvey Reid is doing here. And when the strings are new and the action just right, the guitar is a sweet thing to hold onto.