Collings Oval thick neck slimmed down?

[Eric L]

Hi Everyone,
I have a Collings MT20 that I love the sound of, but the neck is thicker than I prefer.
I am thinking of having the neck slimmed down like my F style and an Ovation I own.

Does anyone else have a story of neck re-shaping to share? Does it affect the tone?

Thank you in advance,

[Bill McCall]

I’d want to know exactly how deep the truss rod is before I removed any wood from the bottom of the neck.

[Rob Roy]

I have a friend who has an older Collings. He has small hands and the V hurt his fretting hand. He had a luthier round the V to a softer V and had it speed necked at the same time. No change in tone.

[Bacfire]

I've had two mandolin necks trimmed/reshaped. Both had quite a bit of wood removed. I had other work done at the same time, so it would be tough to attribute any tonal change to the neck work.

The truss rod location is definitely a concern. Both of my jobs were done by well-known mandolin luthiers. I had to have one of them X-rayed at a local walk-in medical clinic before he would touch it. The X-ray tech was my cousin; I don't know how that request would go over in a typical clinic.

I don't regret either project, but it's easy (for me anyhow) to go down an expensive wormhole of modifications and tweaks to an instrument when the better move would have been to cut bait, or pass on the purchase to begin with.