Here we have a 1965 Fender Jaguar sent to me for restoration. The original finish has long gone and has been replaced by a sort of walnut stain. The neck has also seen better days, the finish is completely gone as has the binding, the original frets have been replaced and judging by the state of the fingerboard, I suspect they were removed with a pick axe. The replacement frets are badly seated and very uneven, there is no way this guitar would have played well like this.
 

The picture to the left shows that the curved rosewood beyond the nut has gone. As mentioned earlier, the binding was removed at some point too. The first job was to remove the frets and repair the fingerboard as much as possible. I used rosewood dust and superglue to fill in the missing chunks that had been torn out when the frets were replaced and also to reinforce the fret slots. I replaced the rosewood at the nut, rebound and then refretted the neck.

Things are starting to look a bit more like it.....but.....it was whilst this was being done I came across a potential problem. Even with no truss rod tension, the neck had developed a fairly serious back bow. It's sometimes possible to plane out a back bow but in this case it's too severe to do that as the fingerboard is of the thin 'veneered' type, planing that much would have resulted in going through the rosewood into the maple...not much good.  It's possible that the neck was left for some time unstrung with the truss rod tensioned, over the course of time it just assumed that shape I am hoping that the string tension will be enough to pull it straight, if not it might be necessary to 'heat set' the neck straight again...we'll see.....