1961 Martin D-18, a History of Repairs

just a heads up this one's going to be heavy on the talking this time hey gang here's an old martin this is a d18 from 1961 and it has been through all the wars and then some this thing is basically a walking history of guitar repair techniques from the 1970s through today and i thought it would be fun to look at this stuff and kind of get a feel for how repair philosophy has changed over the years i mentioned in a recent video that guitar repair as a discipline is pretty young it's connected with other instrument traditions but it's distinct in a lot of ways the violin family has its own thing going on that stretches back a couple hundred years and the practitioners there have a pretty solid set of rules and guidelines they follow if you color outside the lines in a violin repair shop they'll smack you upside the head pretty quick and they'll either disown you or they'll bring you back in line they even have a manual which is something that guitar repair does not have as written by hans vicehar costs like 400 bucks if something doesn't show up in that manual it's not okay to do this is all based on the perception that violins and their elk are desirable precious generally speaking they improve with age and the impetus to look after them with reverence has been in place for a very long time it wasn't always so with guitars the idea of a vintage guitar is still really new it's only within like the last 40 years or so the market was driven by novelty new models coming out every year just like an automobile you're conditioned to want the new thing because they put the fancy gadgets on it and for a long time getting a new and shiny guitar was seen as the rite of passage for serious players you got that record deal go down to the shop man get the new one there was some appreciation for the old instruments but by and large it was subcultural you know there were certain segments of the musical population who gravitated towards the old things general buying public wanted a new guitar so in the 60s if a guitar got beat up you might take it to the local mom-and-pop place and they could glue it back together for you but there wasn't yet a consensus as to what was okay to do i think the goal in a lot of cases was to keep it playing for a couple of years until you could afford to buy a new one preservation was not really high on the list it's not just the perception that's changed it's also the technology for instance prior to the late 70s there were serious challenges involved with fixing a guitar that were almost insurmountable to the average repair person because the knowledge necessary had not yet been developed american guitars were not designed to be easily taken apart in a way that the violin is repair was not a consideration in their design this martin has a couple of issues currently it's had a lot more in the past the intonation is off and the owner is complaining that it doesn't want to hold its tuning he'll get it right and in a song or two it's slipped enough that he has to retune he wants to know if we can do anything about that so let's go through the litany of repairs and see if we can learn something here to start off with the sound board has a number of cracks in it which have been glued and maybe re-glued these are quite dark that often happens when wood like this spruce has been left open and exposed to the air for some time it oxidizes and it gets darker and when it's confronted by something liquid like glue it really gets dark and it's thrown into relief this is pretty typical for old cracks i've shown a number of repairs in recent weeks and i've mentioned that a truly invisible job is very very rare for a crack repair you almost always end up seeing it in truth it takes a lot of artistic ability to completely hide a crack and often it's a matter of time rather than just intent you've got a sixty dollar glue up or you've got you know something that's going to take all day long a full day's worth of labor to disguise most luthiers don't want to devote that chunk of time most owners can't afford it so it's usually got to be a really special instrument sometimes you'll see invisible repair pictures online and when you do ask yourself if the light seems to be coming from a different direction in that after shot because that can make a big difference you know there's a crack oh doesn't look so bad the finish on the sound board is very worn of course and i'm not sure it's entirely original it may have had some overspray at some point actually if you look at the cracks in raking light you can see a shinier stripe of lacquer along each of those this bridge has come loose at some point in the past and it's been re-glued surprisingly it doesn't seem to have been cut down in height at any point trying to lower the action on something where everything else has been done but i can pick up evidence around its outline little tiny scuff marks little bits of squeeze out here and there that aren't from the factory also look at this wing here you can see that although it's glued down flat to the sound board right now it's not lifting the top surface has cupped and this tells me that it was probably warped by the back end lifting off slowly over time very much like what we saw last week with that larave bridge it's very difficult to get a bridge to return to perfect flatness if it's warped and it's come off the instrument heat bending is sometimes successful but you have to sort of over bend it to compensate for the spring back and the warp has a kind of muscle memory to it it just wants to do that again so you know the inconsistent results usually we just go ahead and flatten the bottom of the bridge and make it fit to the soundboard you could come back afterwards and use scrapers and sanding to try and flatten the top of the wing as well you're thinning it out at that point and you've probably already thinned it out some you know when you're doing the flattening process on the bottom it gets too thin and to be honest most people don't care and on the treble side the wing seems a little thinner than usual probably as a result of this flattening process a nice byproduct of sanding the base of the bridge is that it also lowers the saddle height a little bit you're lowering the entire bridge that could be advantageous and the reason why nobody ever had to plane the top off this thing so it still looks pretty original from the top other inconsistencies are just part of the way martin was building guitars you can see here that the amount of the through saddle that intrudes into the area of the wing here's on the treble side is quite narrow it's only a couple millimeters much longer on the base side that's because they left the base side thicker and heavier they introduced it to the sanding drum just exposed more of the saddle because this is sort of tapered it's radiused and tapered more on the treble side to kind of mirror what the saddle looks like when it's been set up properly so even though it looks symmetrically unbalanced it's right this guitar seems to have had two neck resets old time ones not the current method i can't tell which one was done first but before the advent of steaming off a neck for removal people would have to access that dovetail cavity somehow and usually it involved cutting through the fingerboard heating the extension up and pulling it away and then dribbling hot water down into the little gap at the front edge of the dovetail usually this cut was made right at the body fret and we can probably see it if we look close sort of see it there i can feel it too and i wonder what happened to the 15th and 17th fret dots those have gone missing somehow now i blame all this on irving sloan who wrote a number of books on guitar construction in the late 60s and early 70s including one on guitar repair he went to the martin shop and a couple other places and in that book it demonstrated this that book was basically the only thing available on guitar repair for at least a decade so people picked up on it and the body joint is absolutely the wrong place to make this cut by the way you end up with two loose pieces unsupported and even when you re-glue them you've got a potential hinge point right here where the tension is focused and the guitar wants to fold up so i mean you'd be far better off making that through cut a few frets down say at the 12th fret so when it comes time to re-glue stuff you've got support under the fingerboard and it's less likely to fall apart again looking at the heel it's a little smaller than normal and there's a thick accumulation of glue and or filler material of some description packed into the space between the heel and the side of the body you don't see this on martin guitars from the factory they finished the body they finished the neck and the two were brought together gibsons of course they did the assembly first and then sprayed afterwards so there's always a heavy coating of material in this corner here but not on martin's the other neck reset is almost more interesting at some point along the line someone came up with what they figured was an elegant solution that didn't involve cutting through the fingerboard and this is called slipping the back what happens is the binding on the back is loosened around the perimeter of the body to a point that's lower than the end of the neck block usually somewhere in the upper bout region here maybe as far down as the waist that's done so you can get a knife in between the back and the interior lining you loosen that area and you also have to free the back from the neck block here after you've done that you can then take the neck and physically tip the neck block inwards correcting the angle uh improving it relative to the sides um this is not unlike early classical guitar construction or baroque instruments where you have an integral neck block the heel isn't separate from that block they're one in the same a spanish style heel you get the geometry right then you glue the back in place and it locks it in so after you've glued the back on then you have to replace the binding if you're clever you go ahead and you recut that binding channel so you don't have to scrape it down to the point where it's the thickness of a piece of paper in this case they did a pretty darn good job it's a little thin up here but you know that it's it's what it is [Music] considerable pinging going on on the inside here you can see the lake of hide glue that was used during the reinstallation of the back it's around the neck block as well i'm not sure if this happened during the procedure some other time but two splits have appeared in the mahogany that ran down to the first back brace those have been shored up with two small circular cleats and also the center reinforcement strip here you can see that it has been cut away a little bit too from the block to provide some room to uh maneuver when that tipping procedure was underway here's another repair on the player's side at the waist so this is a curved surface that's real virtuoso stuff by comparison to some of the other things it's a football shaped insert to take care of what exactly a hole of some kind pretty small maybe someone shot it with a bb gun um it's pretty tight and it's well matched and good job whoever did that one the neck has been refretted at some point but i think it was actually a partial refret these ones down here above the body look original to me around 80 thousands these ones are slightly wider but not so much that you'd notice look at the fingerboard it might be hard to see but do you notice it this has been thinned down towards this end this was the other way of improving the angle and efforts to lower the action it's actually what martin used to do for the longest time the frets were removed and the board was planed angling down towards the nut so it's skinny on this end it's thick up near the body joint then it gets thin again over the extension the side dot markers are proportionately much closer to the surface of the board than they originally started off as it turns out this neck has a lot of relief it's around eighteen thousandths at the sixth fret which is about three times what it would have had when it left the factory it's quite a lot there is no adjustable rod in this guitar of course and you know the relief maybe i could dress some of that out of the fret height but you know i don't think so not on this guitar the frets here were leveled but not really re-crowned very much the tops of them are quite wide and flat and that can cause issues with fret to fret tuning the string takes off ahead of its ideal stopping point right in the middle of the fret so recrowning should improve that quite considerably the saddle that was made for this has the string takeoff point approximately in its middle all the way along and checking the intonation i see that it plays pretty flat at the high e and pretty sharp on the low e low ease on martin's in this period pretty much all play sharp at the 12th fret the saddle angle isn't really enough to get you all the way there and the saddle width is quite narrow being three thirty seconds of an inch it's hard to file enough into it so it can be improved though if we make a new one where the string takes off right at the very back edge of the saddle for the low e and right at the front edge for the high e we'll gain about a thirty second of an inch that's point seven millimeters in compensation that should sweeten things up the other thing is the nut i'm really interested to see how this was shimmed up and if it's glued in place and where martin's as we've discussed in the past have a 15 degree headstock angle and the bottom of the nut is cut to sit on that angle rather than being in line with the fingerboard now what can happen if a knot is placed onto a thick shim like this especially if it isn't glued down securely is that it can rock forward slightly you see that this can eat up string length but also when you're tuning up the strings the drag can hinge it backward a little bit and then when you've been playing on it the pressure on the strings from your fingers will drag it forward again now it might stay like that or it might wobble but anyway you're out of tune we'll also inspect the string slots as you saw i think some of them are too tight or irregular some of them are pinching so that when you tune you're storing up energy there that gets released unexpectedly and your tuning goes kablooey as the string relaxes so i'm i'm betting i'll probably have to make a new nut i'm going to start by re-crowning the frets that's one of the jobs that definitely needs doing i'm putting a little sharpie marker on the tops here so that i can check my progress i'm using a three corner file this time it's very controllable and especially on lower frets sometimes the commercial fret files don't do such a great job the corners on this following ground smooth so there's no chance that it's going to cut through the tape and mess up the board i'm just going to spend some time and turn the flat plateaus on the top of the frets into a nice smooth radius when i'm done there'll just be a hairline of marker left in the top center of the frets and i can polish that off using progressively finer abrasives then i can clean and oil the fingerboard you can see there's quite a lot of wear there in the first position i opted not to fill that this time it wasn't annoying on my fingers when i was courting i was able to sink my scalpel right into the shim there underneath the fret so i realized it was time for it to go i knocked it free and revealed that it was in fact a whole bunch of sheets of regular printer paper now the nut was glued to the top of the paper but not actually to the front of the fingerboard so that was nice they recycled i chiseled that all away and made a new nut i made sure it was a good snug fit for the slot it wasn't going to rock back and forth it's obviously much too tall at this point so i use the half pencil trick to mark out a line that will give me some guidance marking the distance from the edge of the fingerboard to the outside e strings i like about 3.5 millimeters on the base side about three on the treble i mark out the string to string spacing and then use a razor saw to give me a good accurate guideline for my nut slotting files i'll dress off the excess material from the top of the nut and then use various abrasives to polish it until it gleams removing these old through saddles can be a real chore martin used a little bit of hide glue to hold them in place oftentimes later on in their lives they were glued in with something stronger and i think this probably has tight bond under it so i gotta dress off some of the excess material and then saw the thing in two so i can crack it off and chisel there this looks like i'm being really aggressive i spend about 20 minutes being very careful to make myself a nice slot in which i could run the saw through and then i just kind of chisel and tap and chisel and tap and excavate and eventually it all comes out i true up the edges of the slot using a thin safe edge file and then go to town on the saddle blank whipping through this stuff here sanding the profile to shape i'm going to oil up the bridge too because it was pretty dry i've shown before how i use a folded over b string to give myself a good hard take off point um and really dial in the intonation as good as i can get it here i'm following up to each of those intonation lines and then i will blend them all together so it's kind of a nice smooth curve the ends of the saddle i'm using some sandpaper wrapped around a dowel to get that nice scooped effect i managed to break two g-strings during setup until i decided to get smart and file and sand off the sharp corners that had developed on the tuning post using this method it's possible to really dial in the intonation [Music] on some guitars it's not possible to get the b sounding this sweet without modifications depends on how the saddle angle lined up one more little tidbit of martin history here have a look at the headstock it's a classic design iconic really think back to photos you may have seen of those pre-war martins that everyone idolizes the ones that everyone goes wild for think about the headstocks on those and also ones that you might have seen new ones on the iraq at your local music store do you notice anything different it's subtle but it's there not the wood the wood is different this is brazilian rosewood the modern ones would have indian rosewood or some composite but check out the corners on the top here they're pretty radius aren't they kind of soft looking the earlier ones were much sharper and so are the new ones what was happening is that martin was using the exact same shaper template throughout the 40s 50s and 60s to make their headstocks it's a big piece of metal that clamps to the headstock and they run essentially a gigantic router bit around it to cut off the material make the shape over time now they weren't making as many guitars as they are now but it was still adding up every time they passed that shaper across here it got a little bit of wear and over the decades it softened and softened and softened and turned into kind of a marshmallow and it's not even all that symmetrical at this point by the late 60s it was so soft that people started to notice and they realized oh hey this has changed maybe we ought to make a new one so they went back and ever since they've kept it pretty sharp but you can notice this progression as it goes it's fun to look at from guitars you know five years apart you can notice a difference there we have it all strung up now there's one other modification to this guitar we can talk about in this shot here and that is the pick guard which first of all is black which wouldn't have happened until the 1970s would have been a reddish-brown tortoise guard the other thing is it comes really really close to the wing of the bridge there in a way that the original ones didn't ordinarily there's like a 3 8 of an inch gap about 10 millimeters just the sort of thing that would drive a real martin nerd nuts but you know it's fine it's doing the job got this strung with some of these martin tony rice retro strings different sound from the phosphor bronze i'm used to sounds good though so [Music] you

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Id: NaIXCOTzrW4

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020