"A £1000 guitar might as well be a £10 catalogue guitar
if it isn't set up properly."
a good setup will release it's true potential. A guitar
should be a dream to play, not something to battle
with night after night. Skimming (stoning) frets, fine
tuning the action and intonation can transform an
instrument from something that seems to have a mind
of its own to something you actually look forward to
playing and making good music with.
Some classic repairs and modifications ..............
Photographic description of the classic fret skim, fret dress whatever you would like to call it ....
Frets in pretty bad shape!
Frets leveled to remove wear.
Frets re-crowned.
Frets polished ready for restringing.
This head break looks bad, but the repair will be as strong, if not stronger than before.
Total rewire on this Les Paul Signature - Balanced Low impedance (29 Ohm) pickups, totally balanced internal wiring with balanced recording output and tranformer coupled Hi impedance unbalanced output. The original wiring had been virtually stripped out by someone not quite understanding the basic principles of the balanced low impedance circuitry - most of the bits were missing, even the original transformer. luckily Gibson still had a schematic of the original wiring.
Below is a 1939 Gibson Lap steel owned by my good friend Andy Mackenzie, Andy brought this into the workshop complaining the tone pot had seized. As I started opening this beautiful historic instrument I realised that I was possibly the only guy to have been inside these controls since 1939 - quite a moment, thinking of those Gibson luthiers assembling it back in the late 30's - Orville Gibson and Lloyd Loar still around watching the technological progress of their old company. All the pot needed was the shaft lubricating and the carbon track cleaning. The components are testament to the quality of the engineering of the time. Even the jack socket still had wonderful tension and was not at all intermittent. Note the unusual magnet arrangement of the original Charlie Christian pickup and compensated blade polepiece.
One of the problem of fitting a Charlie Christian type pickup to a guitar once fitted with a humbucker is that the hole is too large for the Charlie Christian. This one was fitted in a custom made ebony surround.
The following photographs are of a completely unplayable 60's Gibson 12 string, the bridge had dropped and the action was a mile high. The photograph shows a crack in the top that had previously been repaired and cleated, not a bad job, but only the crack had been fixed - the real problem was that the blow or pressure that had caused the crack had done more damage than just crack the top. After a time under full string pressure the action had changed dramatically, due to the bridge dropping on its front edge.
The next photograph from a mirror inside the guitar shows two loose struts where the fibres of the top had come away with the strut when it got the blow. The result of the two loose struts was that the bridge no longer had any support on its front leading edge, the top was sinking into the body and the action was going sky high.
The solution was to clamp the top back into its crowned position and leave it like that for a couple of weeks, really to let the top get used to being back in its original state after many years. After a couple of weeks the struts were glued back in place - this was all done with the top still clamped back into it's crowned state. Three days later when all the glue had dried the crown was back in the top - it was restrung, a new bridge saddle made for it, result was it played like a dream. Note: the fabric used by Gibson at this time for reinforcing the bracing - a solution but not the best, that's why it's not often seen on modern guitars, better glues and assembly methods have improved things.
While on the subject of loose struts. Someone decided to sit on the case of this Crafter Acoustic not realising the case would not take their weight. Lots of surface cracks that could be repaired but the customer also complained of some rattling that seemed to come from inside - the strut ends had been loosened and were rattling. A bit of glue and a clamp fixed the problem.
This next customer had a 34" scale Warwick Roc bass but wanted a 30" scale version, with a Fender jazz bass nut width and profile - a new neck was fashioned from some nice flamed maple and fitted with an ebony fingerboard.
This Gibson Les Paul was apparently a cheap e-bay buy! - it turned out to be an expensive horror, the description said professionally repaired head break! - The head break had been repaired and set with the wrong angle on the headstock, it was almost parrallel to the fingerboard - how they managed that I don't know! this resulted in no down bearing over the nut, strings rattled in the nut and to cap it all they had managed to remove so much wood around the truss rod cavity that it no longer worked. The job was a new neck, fingerboard and refinish of the neck, all I managed to salvage from the old neck was the headstock veneer containing the pearl logo and transfer - I left what remained of the old headstock in the case to later prove the serial number of the instrument. It was a nasty and expensive job!
An old 60's Guild Starfire came in with internittent electrics - once they were pulled out of the cavity it was obvious it was going to need a lot of cleaning and re soldering. Moisture over the years had corroded most metal parts and the residue was causing problems with conductivity, cleaned up and re-soldered joints and a new jack socket had it back to normal.
The next series of photographs chart the progress of a new top on a 1947 Gibson LG. The first photograph shows the failed bridge plate - the cause of the top lifting along with age and failed bracing joints. Firstly the neck is steamed off, a new top is fashioned and braced, the top is fitted, bound and sprayed, a new bridge is fitted. The final job sounded nice with it's new Adirondack Spruce top!
This one I dont quite understand, if you buy a 12 string Rickenbacker and you want it to intonate correctly you have to buy a 12 way bridge to upgrade it - it doesnt come as standard?
Here is an interesting project, I believe this is a 1937 to 1940 Gibson L50 or L37, it's in a pretty bad state. The sides have cracked and destroyed the mechanical integrity of the sound box, the collapse looks like it was due to a cracked brace in the top that wasn't repaired at the time. The result is it needs new sides, the top repairing, refretting and finally refinishing - I'll post more photo's as I progress. The owners father had owned this guitar since his mother had bought it him for his 21st birthday back in the 40's and now it's all coming back to being playable.
An old attempted repair results in the need for totally new sides.
A bit of info for any other luthiers out there doing a similar job - the neck dovetail was under the top, in other words when it was made the neck was glued into the neck block, then the top was glued on, then the fingerboard was glued on. Not a sequence I had expected, normally the whole neck would be glued on after the top, the result was as the neck was lifting out with the steam the top was actually coming with it!- anyway I got it out with minimal damage!
Here you can see the crack in the right hand brace that has caused most of the catastrophe.
More to follow ---
