New PRS Herman Li, for realz this time

I have had chance to look now and I love the guitar but it still has that fundamental weakness across the grain in the heel. The distance between the heel carve and the pickup cavity is the relevant part . The pickup underlying piece is not having any effect on the vulnerable grain that failed on the broken prototype. I don’t know what changed since the broken neck incident to make it survive the test in the video but nothing has fundamentally changed in the design. It’s still a one piece quarter sawn set neck that goes under the pickup.
They may have increased the length slightly but it doesn’t look like it. I would have expected some mechanical reinforcement at this point that negates the weakest part of the neck across the smallest area with the grain in the weakest orientation. Something like the Strandberg carbon leaves in a five piece laminate would increase the strength ten fold. Everything else I really like. In normal situations it’s not going to face that degree of test so it probably doesn’t matter. But it’s a design flaw by any measure from an engineering perspective.
 
DrewJD82 said:
I actually thought it was thicker than that as it looks pretty beefy in comparison to the body, so that body must be thin AF!
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Now that I look at the neck joint it seems odd to me with that little bit of neck heel poking out.

Why not make it a neck-through or carve it flush?

44mm is a little wild. Doesn’t Ibanez use 43mm? I’m not sure I’d want that extra width
 
metropolis_4 said:
Now that I look at the neck joint it seems odd to me with that little bit of neck heel poking out.

Why not make it a neck-through or carve it flush?

44mm is a little wild. Doesn’t Ibanez use 43mm? I’m not sure I’d want that extra width
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My guess is so they can do all the shaping and sanding before the neck is set, so getting that joint perfect would be very difficult without further shaping. Having an edge reveal is a nice compromise and looks good imo. Would probably do better over time as the different wood species contract and expand too.
 
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