A repair job finished!

I know I mentioned a repair I was working on back in October, but I've been kind of busy and haven't had time to blog about it. Considering I have a week of free time before I start my new job, now is a good time to write a blog. As mentioned before, the job was a cheaply made Japanese dreadnought from the 1970s, a Terada T-100. I searched the web for information about the guitar, but I wasn't able to find any information on them, other than that some people really seemed to like them, despite how cheaply made they were.

Here is the guitar when I took it in:




This guitar was in pretty rough shape when I got it on my bench and the action made it pretty much un-playable. The average saddle height for a measurement taken at the 12th fret on the low E string should be .09" and as you can see in the photo below, this one is over .140", way too high for anybody to play. I realize the picture shows the height at the 11th fret, but the photo was taken for illustration purposes.


The photo below shows the neck extension height. The straightedge should be even with the top of the bridge, but was about 1/16" low, a problem which will be corrected with new frets and planing down the bridge.


The first order of business was a re-fret and fingerboard repairs. The old frets had some serious divots in them at the first position, as did the fingerboard itself. Using my trusty soldering iron and fret pullers, I carefully removed the frets so i could work on the fingerboard. I used some rosewood dust and super glue to fil the fretboard divots and re-sanded the radius into the fingerboard as well as straightening it lengthwise. When it was ready for new frets, I radiused and rough cut the frets to length. Because the fingerboard was bound, the tangs needed to be cut off the ends of the frets so they would fit in the slots. Then the fret slots were cleaned and the edges of the slots were filed to allow the frets to seat properly. Despite my efforts, I didn't have a lot of luck with the frets seating properly and had a lot of fret end gluing to do. This was quite frustrating and makes me really think it is worth investing in a fretwire bender and a set of fret presses. It's too bad they are so ridiculously expensive, so maybe if I get ambitious one of these days I'll work on making my own. Re-frets are a tedious job, so I'll fast forward a bit so as not to bore you... The frets were then beveled, leveled, crowned, sanded, and polished to make the guitar play great and ensure that the frets don't buzz, a process that takes at least another 2 hours or so. I know that the guitar will now play much better than it ever did.

The frets, fingerboard and nut before starting work:


In the above picture, you can see how deep the divots in the frets and fingerboard were. They are now non-existant:


After the fret job was done, I could now tell how far the bridge needed to be taken down. The fret job took care of about 1/32", so the bridge needed to be planed down about another 1/32". The existing saddle was a steel drop-in adjustable piece with only 2 small points of actual down pressure on the bridge, definitely not an efficient way to transfer energy from the string vibrations to the top.


The customer told me to do whatever it needed, so I made the decision to plug the existing saddle slot with rosewood and re-route a new slot for a new bone saddle. The plug was fairly easy to fit, and once it was glued in, I planed the bridge down to a good neck extension height. After this was done, I measured and marked the saddle location and set up the saddle routing jig.

Here is the jig setup:



The saddle routing jig worked pretty well, aside from a minor technical difficulty with the router base. Before I started routing, I made sure that the height adjustment screws were tightened, but one screw started coming unscrewed after I started routing. I had to hold the screw to keep it from turning any further as I routed. Needless to say, the saddle slot wasn't as clean as I would have liked but I was still able to get a saddle to fit tightly in the slot.

Here is the finished product, with a stubborn pin that wouldn'tstay down on the low e string. The pins were in pretty rough shape and I recommended that the customer buy a new set for the guitar.


The last step was making a new nut, as the previous nut was a joke. It was held in with rubber cement and had a plexiglass riser underneath because the nut slots were too deep. It felt really good to be finished with this job.

Here is the finished guitar:


Well, maybe not. Bubba thinks he's a guitar sometimes and loves to lay inside cases. I forgot to take any pictures of the actual finished product, but there are a couple of pictures of the finished work above. Hopefully I'll get some more repair jobs to blog about as it is still going to be a while until I'm able to build any more guitars.

Commissions???

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I've been a busy guy, looking for jobs and working and living and stuff. It also doesn't help that I have no internet at home and have to go to the library to get online. That will soon change, as I am starting a job at Qwest on Monday and will have a nice discount on some DSL service, not to mention a decent paycheck finally... I worked at guitar center for about a month from august-september, but it was a pretty horrible job and I basically got paid slightly more than minimum wage to unpack and set up merchandise on their sales floor. I got a job valeting at the country club that my girlfriend works at and I really enjoy doing that, but I don't have enough hours there. Life is good otherwise.

I've gotten one guitar repair job so far, making a saddle for a classical guitar and doing some more extensive work on a 1970s japanese made dreadnought that was in rough shape. The fingerboard was in horrible shape, so I did some repairs to that, including a refret. Being bound, it was a bit difficult, but the frets are now in and it's ready for leveling and dressing. It also really needed a neck reset, but it wasn't worth the effort so I decided to plug the drop in saddle slot, shave the bridge, and re-route and make a new saddle. I'm in the process of finishing that and I will also be making a new nut once the frets are dressed and the work on the bridge is done. I really should stop dragging my feet on this one, but this guitar has been giving me nothing but problems which are to be expected on a guitar of such low quality. Has anyone ever heard of Terada guitars? I really only agreed to do the work because the guitar has sentimental value to the owner and I can imagine it might actually sound pretty decent if I can get it playing decent. I'll post some before and after photos when it's done.

I've also been approached with a couple of possible commissions. The first is for a banjo for my good friend Steve, which would be some pretty straight forward lutherie, except for figuring out how to turn the rim. Most resources I've consulted highly recommend using a metalworking lathe, but those run around $2000 at least, money I don't really have for a one time project. I'm sure I'll figure something out. The second commission is for an OM style acoustic guitar for my friend Adam's wife. I'm really excited about getting this going and getting back into guitarmaking. It will give me motivation to move all my power tools out of my parents basement and start using them to make some guitars. Good things are on the horizon!

I hope to continue posting more here soon, as I am now up to over 2000 visitors to this blog and it is very cool to receive comments from interested readers from all over.

They're done!! (Well 2 of them anyways...)

I can't believe it's been almost three months since my last post! Things have been interesting since I finished school. I got a job assisting a mason that I worked through the month of June, but I wasn't quite built for the job and the guy I was working for was kind of a jerk so he let me go and didn't even pay me what he owed me. A lot has happened since then and I've been focusing on my job search lately, which I'm hoping will end soon. If anybody knows of any lutherie or woodworking jobs available around the Minneapolis/St Paul area, let me know. I've got one interview tomorrow and it is the first in my three weeks of job searching, but I do what I can... Enough about my life, and on to the guitars!!!

The Southeast Tech guitar show was on May 8th, and it was a great but stressful day. I had a couple of hours after gluing the bridge the day before to get the nut and saddle made, tuners installed, and bridge pin holes drilled, reamed, and slotted. To make a long story short, I got my guitar strung up about a half hour before the show and life was good. My parents also came down for the show, and I felt bad because I was too busy finishing the setup that I couldn't really show them around. The show went disaster free for everybody, and despite the fact that a couple of my fellow students had some bridges that were starting to come unglued, no bridges popped off of guitars. Although dreadnoughts are usually flatpicked, I decided to have Phil Heywood fingerpick my guitar in the show and it sounded great!

This is me describing my guitar:

And Phil Heywood playing it:
My dad holding my guitar with me in the background:I was exhausted...

My guitar in it's case on display at the show:
During the last two weeks in may, I took an advanced finishing course and put a lovely dyed red finish on my electric guitar. This course was pretty cool, and we learned about some other types of finishes commonly used in the industry like CAB Urethane and Polyester, as well as doing some really cool metal flake project boards, which I think I may end up making guitar shaped clocks out of... I'm fairly happy with how the finish turned out on the electric, but I'm wishing i would have paid more attention when sanding it because you can definitely see some sanding scratches under the lacquer. They aren't noticeable from more than a foot or so away and even so you have to look pretty carefully to notice. The thing is that I know that they're there and so I always see them. Grrr... I was also able to get my dreadnought buffed out and set up properly, and it now looks and plays beautiful in addition to sounding beautiful.

A nice shot of the body showing off the bearclaw in the top:
The end graft:

Back and sides:
And my bridge design:
It took me a couple of weeks to even start mounting hardware and a few more weeks to start wiring. I accidentally broke the plunger switch on the preamp when i was test fitting it before finishing the guitar, but LR Baggs sent me a new one free of charge and very promptly, so kudos to their customer service. It was kind of tough to get the old switch off of it, but once I finally did, it only took about 30 seconds to solder the new one in. A couple of Saturdays ago, I spent a solid 2 hours or so wiring the whole thing up and mounting the spring claw for the tremolo. Last weekend, I finally did a fret job, made a nut, installed the spring trees and tuner screws, installed the straplocks, and did a fairly thorough set up.

I must say that I am quite happy with how everything came together with the gold hardware, cocobolo fingerboard, red finish, and the flame on the neck. It all looks classy, even the diamonds on the fingerboard, which were a cover-up for a mistake. I also love how it sounds. I didn't have any radioshack .022 mfd capacitors, so I ordered a few of the Sprague Orange Drops off of ebay and installed one in the tone circuit. I'm not sure how much of an audible difference it makes, but it sure beats the .047 mfd that I had installed in the tone circuit temporarily. I love this guitar and have been playing it quite a bit more than the SG since I finished it. I was going for a tone similar to The Black Keys, and the hot golds paired with my Hot Rod Deluxe comes pretty close. Enough rambling about it, you wanna see pictures!

A couple of shots of the front and back of the headstock and neck:
And a couple of the body with all the lovely gold hardware:

And the front and back of the guitar as a whole:Oops, the holes in the tremolo cavity cover don't quite line up with the string holes in the tremolo block, so I guess I'll have to take it off to re-string. Grrr... I guess it's something to make sure I get right the next time.

Fraternal twins!

Part of the reason it took me so long to get assembled and set up is that I didn't have a good place to work, and I was just getting frustrated with working on the kitchen table, having to clear it off for dinner, and not being able to have my tools organized in any way. It turns out that my new house in Golden Valley just so happened to have a bench in the basement that just had a bunch of junk that nobody ever used on it. A few hours cleaning and organizing, and I now have a great place to work on guitars, complete with magnetic racks for chisels! It even came with a bench dog!

Here's a photo of my new workspace:
Bubba likes to lay on the cool basement floor underneath the bench while I work:
There's an empty room next to this bench and I'm hoping I may be able to fill it with power tools soon and start making some more guitars and finish the archtop eventually as well. I'll keep you posted...

Until next time.

It's shiny!

This last week has been one of the most stressful of the year, and I'm quite relieved that it's over, although next week will be no cakewalk either. Here's a brief rundown of what I've been up to:

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent sanding the acoustic and preparing for finishing, Thursday I sprayed a sealer coat, did some touchup, and applied grain filler.

Yesterday I put a couple final touches on the electric so it is now ready to be sanded for finishing. These include rounding over the body, sanding epoxy off the fretboard inlays, fine tuning the radius of the fingerboard, and installing frets.

Last night, I was up until about 2 am sanding the grain filler off of the acoustic so I could start spraying lacquer on today. I didn't quite finishing the grain fill sanding last night, so I spent a couple of hours this morning finishing that chore. Once that was done, I had to record some top thicknesses and sprayed a sealer coat before lunch. After lunch, I got 4 coats of lacquer sprayed and even got in some good work on my archtop neck as well as gluing the archtop back to the ribs. I may have it done for the advanced finishing class that I'm taking in the last 2 weeks of May so I can put a pretty sunburst on it! I'm stoked about everything.

Below are some photos of how the acoustic is sprayed.

First, I spray the front, back and edges of the headstock:
...then I spray the sides:...then the back and top:
...and then another coat on the sides since they are harder to spray and the finish doesn't seem to build up on them as easily:...and lastly I hang up the guitar and spray the neck:

Oops, I sprayed a little too heavily on the headcap and developed some runs. It's alright though because this will be leveled out later:

And a few shots of the nice, wet, shiny guitar hanging in the booth to dry:
This is the current progress on the archtop:
I just need to get those blasted braces fit to the inside of the top, and the box will be together and ready for routing the binding channel.

Here are a couple of shots of the electric progress:I think the diamonds turned out quite nicely and look awesome with the gold fretwire. Unfortunately I'm not sure where my camera battery charger is, so I used Alex's camera to take these, so I apologize for them being out of focus.
This guitar looks better in person. I just have a couple of burn marks from routing the roundover in the body that need to be sanded out, as well as finishing the roundover taper on the back and arm contour transitions. This thing will be done soon!

Umm... diamonds and sanity.

Tell me people am I going insane???

Well I guess I'm not, but I sure as heck am stressed out. After a couple of days of sanding, the acoustic is finally ready to start being sprayed! I was hoping to get the sealer coat on today so I could grain fill the first thing tomorrow morning, but that didn't happen. The good news is that there's no more sanding! This leaves me with the following needing to get done at the specified times: Spray sealer and apply grain filler tomorrow, sand grain filler friday night and maybe saturday morning, spray another sealer coat and 4 gloss lacquer coats on Saturday, Spray 4 more lacquer coats on Monday, level sand lacquer and spray 4 more coats on Tuesday, spray 4 more coats Wednesday and glue bridge on near the end of the day, and lastly make nut and saddle on Thursday by 3. I can do it. Fun stuff. Lots of stress.

Considering there was nothing to do on the acoustic tonight, I decided to get some work done on the notacaster. After much deliberation, I decided that I was going to do diamonds on the entire fretboard so things would look uniform and not as if I screwed up, so tonights order of business was to cut out more gold mother-of-pearl diamonds and inlay them into the fingerboard. I used a jeweler's saw and a handy dandy inlay cutting jig I made to cut out the pearl. Then I located on the fingerboard where they would be placed and traced the outline of each diamond. With the outlines drawn, I used the dremel tool with a precision router base to route out the fingerboard. Then, it was just a matter of mixing up some dark mission brown with epoxy, and epoxying the diamonds in place. I'll have to sand all the excess epoxy off on Friday to see how everything turned out, but I'm pretty sure that the diamonds will look awesome!

Here is the fingerboard after having the cavities for the diamonds routed out. You can also see all the diamonds that I cut out behind it, as well as the precision router base with the dremel in the upper left hand corner:

And after epoxying the diamonds in:The fingerboard looks really messy now, but it's a good idea to really pack the epoxy in so there will be no gaps.

And here is a shot of the body with the control cavity cover that I made by laminating 3 thin pieces of the top wood:It's not a perfect grain match because that would be impossible considering the pieces were cut from a different plane of the wood, but it's pretty close and I think it turned out really well.

That's all I have for tonight, but I'll try to post pictures of the acoustic finishing process and archtop tomorrow or Friday.

Not quite living up to the title of the blog.

It's been a rough couple of days, and I have a feeling it's going to get worse. I have more sanding to do in the next couple of days than I've ever done in my entire life. It's pretty ridiculous.

Friday was a fairly good day in electric construction, and a lot of last minute pre-finishing stuff got done or started. I routed my battery box hole, the tremolo spring cavity cover recess route, and spent a good deal of time the wood control mounting plate. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and I was able to get the grain lines and figure to line up fairly nice. I also rasped out a little arm contour and started sanding the body out before doing the round-over on the body edges. I just have some fretwork, sanding, and round-over routing to do and the electric will be ready to get a finish at the end of May. I'm pretty excited.

The acoustic and archtop are not coming along as well. We had open lab time on Saturday and being that punctuality was not mandatory, I decided to go in to school an hour late to recover some sleep from being up fairly late on Friday. Needless to say, this set the lazy tone for the day and I didn't get a whole lot done. One of the problems the acoustic had before receiving frets is that the fingerboard was not securely glued in first position area and so I set about fixing this on Saturday by using a feeler gauge to work some thinned out hide glue into the loose area and clamp it down. This went pretty smoothly, except for the fact that there was a little rust on my feeler gauge which contaminated the hide glue. To make a long story short, my fingerboard came almost completely unglued when I was hammering frets in yesterday and I became a bit lugubrious at this point. I did, however spend some time on inlay on saturday also and inlaid an awesome little anchor into my headstock. I've gotten quite a few compliments on it from my classmates and I'm really happy with how it turned out. The guitar is, after all, a dreadnought body style, which is also the name of a British gunship from the early 1900s so I felt an anchor was rather fitting.

This is the gold mother-of-pearl anchor:

Today, my first and only order of business was to re-glue the fingerboard on to the dreadnought. This may sound like a simple operation, but I assure you it was anything but. First of all, I had to heat up the other half of the fingerboard that did not pop off yesterday and use a fingerboard removal knife to pry it off. This was a fairly easy job, since I used hide glue to glue the fingerboard on the first time. I decided that this time around I would put the frets in before gluing the fingerboard so I could use the arbor fret press. I had some chip-out from pulling the frets that I had originally pounded in that I had to fix , and touched up the radius of the fingerboard a little as well. Next, I had to rig up some clamping cauls. Since the neck had already been shaped, I no longer had a flat surface to clamp to and figured out a way to make a neck cradle work as a clamping caul with a little help from some cork. Also, since the frets were in I had to make notched cauls to spread the clamping pressure directly on to the fingerboard instead of the frets. Once these were made, I did some dry clamping and discovered that my fingerboard had somehow developed a round on the bottom surface that gets glued to the neck. It is crucial that the bottom of the fingerboard is flat for a good glue joint to the neck. Perhaps this is one of the reasons it failed in the first place. After a decent amount of time spent re-flattening the bottom of the fingerboard, it was finally ready to go after a dry clamping showed very minimal gapping. From what glue squeeze-out I have cleaned up so far, it looks like the fingerboard is on much better this time. I also used tite-bond because I feel more confident with it and it's longer working time, but that's an issue that many luthiers will have something to say about...

Here's a shot of the guitar with the fingerboard back on and all the frets except for the 1st and 14th in: