Thinking DIY

Neck glued and clamped With everything prepared, it was time to start gluing... the messy, ugly thing with no option to Undo. First I glued the neck: put some glue on both sides of the neck joint, both on the body and on the neck, pushed the neck in place, put the bolt with the nut in to pull the body and the neck together on the horizontal axis, and clamped the end of the fretboard to the body with some cardboard used to protect the body from clamp marks. Two clamps went on from the sides, and an additional clamp from the soundhole, clamping together the brace+soundboard+fretboard. After 24 hours I have removed the clamps, and it was time to glue the bridge. Another safety check, another test-fit of the bridge to more precisely mark the bridge location, with the two tester strings has revealed that the bridge should be ~1mm farther away from the soundhole than I have initially marked it (the unfinished area), but that isn't really visible, and probably will cover that...

Gluing the bridge is an important step, and the bridge must be clamped properly while the glue is hardening to have a good grip. That is done either with a special bridge-clamp clamping through the string holes (which I don't have) or with C-clamps, which I haven't found around. So there's room for improvisation. After checking how people make their home-made bridge clamps, I have found three designs which I particularly like. One from Ben Crowe of Crimson Guitars , simple and mostly wood-based, and another one from Jack Houweling, which is based around some wood extending the arms of a quick-grip clamp, and the last one , based around a bent piece of metal, from Rattlecan Guitar Restorations. Although I like Ben's one, I don't have Mahogany and Maple (or too much hardwood at all), I only have some black locust/false acacia/robinia pseudoacacia, which might be good enough as a replacement. An additional complication is that the bridge I have is an over-sized one...

The neck and the body being prepared for mounting, I decided to first finish them with boiled linseed oil. Applying BLO was easy, and resulted in a beautiful satin finish. Applied two coats with a brush to the guitar top and the headstock, with 24+ hours between the two coats. I started doing a french polish with a very small rubber on the body, but it didn't really turn out as I expected, so I first sanded with P500, then with P1200 sandpaper, and went on with a third coat of BLO, and then restarted the french polishing (after reading some more and watching some more instructional videos) This time I used some thinner (white spirits, as I didn't have denatured alcohol) to thin the dewaxed shellac, and applied it with a larger rubber. Went over both the body and the headstock in a session of 5 runs, sanding with 500, then 1200 grit sandpaper between the 3rd and the 4th run, as the rubber got a bit sticky and left some marks on the finish, and wanted to even that out. The he...

With the neck being prepared (headstock finished with boiled linseed oil, fretboard inlay in place) the time came for (re)fretting the instrument. I had a set of fretwire laying around, but they were fairly thin ones, and very loose in the fretboard, so I selected some wider ones (both the upper and the lower part), namely Dunlop Accu-Fret Jumbo 6110 , they fit almost perfectly, not too tight, but not loose either. I first verified that all fret channels are deep enough (given that I have reshaped the fretboard to have a 10" radius the problematic parts were near the edges), and cut them a bit deeper where the fretwire didn't fit. Test fitting the fretwire Then came the gluing part. Given that I wanted to have minimal mess on the fretboard (given that it is a light maple, and given my experiences while doing the inlay with superglue), out of the options suggested by a StewMac video for superglue I chose the one with adding the glue from the sides, but as that didn...

As this guitar won't ever be the same as it was, why not put my imprint on it? Customizing the rosette would be how the masters are doing it, but I'm just a newbie, so the easiest way to do it is having custom inlay(s). The headstock surely can receive something, as it's quite empty, it never had anything on it. But the fingerboard also looks plane, so why not customize that, as the frets are off, it was radiused, but a couple more strokes can't hurt. So adding a 12th fret marker would be the nice thing. After some thought I decided that the topic of this guitar is renaissance/new live/etc. So the inlays will be around that theme: Headstock inlay design The headstock inlay will be the chinese mu symbol, meaning wood and also wooden/made of wood (see google translate ). That's completely true for a guitar. But in a broader vision, namely the chinese five elements philosophy "The Wood Element is the energy associated with regeneration, renewal, and grow...

Neck set at proper angle So, there are some changes in the plans (e.g. installing frets to the fretboard will happen before finishing - if I'll finish the fretboard at all). But there are ones, which complicate my life. A lot. As the bridge is done, neck angle can be checked. And it is off, so the lowest possible action will be very high, if I simply glue the neck in as it is now.  Setting neck angle (aka neck reset) So I took a long straight-edge, measured how much tilt-back the neck needs in order to be flat with the top of the bridge. And 2-3mm of the neck heel must be taken off to have it straight up to the bridge. Straight up to the bridge Marked a straight line from the intersection of the neck heel and the fretboard to the lower part of the heel, 2-3 mm into the wood. With a chisel shaved off some material, and progressed slowly, checking the fit after each 5-10 chisel strokes, until I got to the desired neck angle and neck fit. Shimming the neck join...

The original headstock was almost rectangular, with a small slope on the top. I didn't like it very much, but wasn't sure if reshaping is worth it, but after several rounds of drawing and designing (most of the time directly on the sanded-down headstock) I have finally done it. First design on paper, test-fitted to the neck First I filled the holes which will need to be moved (due to the curve going close to them, and the tuning keys shouldn't bee too close (or too far) from the edge. I did that with some wooden dowels I could find around, plus wood glue. After the glue cured, I have cut them with a saw to an approximate size, then sanded the headstock (with the dowels sticking out) to strip it from the finish and to level the dowels. I also filled the screw holes on the back with some toothpick and wood glue. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture with the holes filled. I then drew a thin outline on the headstock of how it could look, went over the line with a p...

With both the neck and the body in a better shape, the work continues. Ordering would take ages (one month or more), and I really would like to take this guitar repair as a challenge of May, I decided to try to "fix" the old bridge. Started off with some bridge designs I have found online, marked the saddle slot and the curves with a pencil. The design is heavily inspired from the fairly standard bridges, but with the constraints I had from the string holes and the bridge size. After the "design" being ready, started sanding off the finish, then reshaping the bridge to a more "curvy" bridge and touching up the parts where the strings have cut into the wood. I decided to mount it backwards compared to it's original state, so with the string holes facing away from the soundhole, and not towards it, wrapping around the bridge.     The end result isn't perfect, as I didn't want to sand t...

As mentioned earlier , I have removed the neck from the body and the frets from the neck previously, so it was time to work on the guitar neck. Except for the usefulness of having a convex radius, after the body finish being sanded down, the neck looked out of the place with its natural aging, and probably would also be the same after finishing, so yet another reason to reshape the neck. This is usually done with a sanding block, which obviously (as most of the tools required) are not available in my town, and in the country, so I had two options, either wait weeks for an order to arrive, or do it the DIY way. After seeing several methods on how to do a sanding block, but all of them being complicated and needing special tools, I came up with my own method (or at least something I didn't see anywhere else). I took something round (more exactly a strong 10l metallic paint bucket)  with a radius (26 cm ~=10.2 inches) approximately matching the 10 inch radius I needed, glued some...

First step for the piece work was separating the body and the neck. As most people recommended, started heating (with a hairdryer and an iron) the end of the fretboard and around the joint. The heel was already partially separated, and after unscrewing the screw below the strap button it was ready to be removed, with only the end of the fretboard keeping it. After carefully heating that part and separating with a safety cutter, it came off without (serious) damage. Neck, bridge, body and frets, everything is here. The joint is very loose, that's a fact. It was already re-glued, and there are two types of glues visible there, a pink one and a white one, so probably wasn't cleaned, maybe the second one was just injected without separating the neck from the body. To be able to work with the body, the bridge had to be removed too, it involved the same process, but it was a lot longer, the bridge was well-glued, without anything else keeping it in place. While removing i...