My apologies if someone has posted this before, but I ran across this on YouTube (all I do anymore is watch guitar videos which tells you something about the exciting life I lead) where the guy planes the fretboard to lower the action on a late 70's D35. He also replaced the frets with evo gold fret wire and made some other improvements. The job appears to have turned out great. So this begs the question of whether planing the neck is a preferable alternative to the dreaded neck reset
I didn't watch the video but something just doesn't make sense about the proposition:
Planing the board is going to make it
thinner, but that's not going to get the strings closer to the frets ("lowering the action" as stated, quite the opposite in fact); and no way it's going to compensate for bad angle which is what really requires a re-set.
I suspect the real problem was a
distorted neck, not a bad neck angle.
If the distortion created "high spots" along the fretboard then yes planing would be the appropriate fix to
lower the high spots (areas where "action" is too close to the frets) by making the fretboard "flat" again..
But that's an entirely different problem than the neck alignment ("neck angle") being so far gone it needs a re-set.
Planing wouldn't help to compensate for excessively high action caused by bad neck angle since if you make the board thinner by planing that would tend to aggravate the problem, making the strings even further away from the tops of the frets.
Unless it was re-fretted with sitar frets.
I've always thought once a neck starts moving, it continues to move. If that's the case, then this solution is only a temporary fix.
No, we've got reports of 'em getting to a point that's "marginal" and then staying there for years, until the time of the report, at least.
Suspect it may be related to how tight the dovetail a and whether or not hideglue was used when considering other makers besides Guild (and even Guild used Titebond in necksetting in New Hartford for sure, at least.)
But again I don't think that was the real problem here.