Repairs
"A £1000 guitar might as well be a £10 catalogue guitar if it isn't set up properly."
Let me set it up for you and release its 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 creating some
good sounds 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.
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 12string Rickenbacker and you want it to intonate correctly you have to buy a 12 way bridge to upgrade it - it doesnt come as standard?
