440 RSW 1912 Gibson Style O

[Music] hello my friends jerry rosa here in the roses string works workshop getting ready to start on a rush job yes we do rush jobs here occasionally and we will be putting a video out about that a little bit more in detail and about our place where you can stay while we're doing your rush job we have a retreat here on the farm we call it the valley springs ranch retreat and it's in conjunction with rosa string works of course we've got a really nice place to stay and mr goins from ohio is here right now he is staying there this evening and he wants me to fix up his father's guitar and have it ready for him to go while he's staying here and then he can take it back with him to ohio so that is an option we are going to charge more for that option we'll talk about all of that down the road too in another future video but right now we're going to show you the guitar because it's not your average father's guitar it looks like this yes it's an old gibson and you think wow what kind of guitar is that many of you probably have never seen a guitar like this uh they're not real common i've only had a couple in the shop over the years this is a style oh guitar this one is a 1912 and it's in remarkably good shape very few problems at all but there are a few problems and we're going to take care of those i'm pulling this up to keep it from touching the top and bouncing and hitting the top but uh it's pretty darn cool don't you think style oh 1912. so what is it in here for well we're going to do a fret job on it set up that way we're going to fix little problems that it has one of the problems it needs to be addressed there's a crack in it right here it goes up through here and it is an open crack it's not just in the finish or anything so we need to fix that there's a little flake of binding i think this probably came loose and somebody forced it back in there and it broke and then glued it in place so we're going to try to fill that in best we can the same problem on this side but this side here the binding is completely loose as you can see so but it won't go back down in there at least not without heating it we're going to try heating it and see if we can force it into place and glue it and if that works then great otherwise we may have to actually physically cut it push it down in there put a new piece in between the cut there's some other little issues minor issues like i feel something right here this could be loose this strip of inwood i think it is actually loose i think there's a problem there and we'll address that so we're really going to address every little detail that we can find on it while it's here and so i've got my work cut out for me to try to get this done as quick as possible and here we go the very first thing i'm going to do is remove this tailpiece because they just flop up and down constantly and bang the top and i don't want that to happen while i'm working on it i've got a lot of work to do to it and i want to get that done as quick as possible this end pin has been broken and glued back together that's the original end pin we may just go ahead and keep that as is and use it or potentially you know put a new one in here and he could keep this one in the case or something i don't know i'll talk to him about that and by the way uh mr goins brought me a little gift too which is kind of nice some ca glue this is the extra thick ca glue and it has the accelerator with it well that accelerator is very handy regardless whether we use the extra thick or not the extra thick is great though for filling big holes i'm going to do the cosmetic things first and the structural things first before we get down to the fret job this structural issue here where i can see the top moving we're going to get glue in here and get this clamped up let that start drying that's going to be the first thing as a matter of fact it's late in the day i may just go ahead and glue this up and let it set overnight and so that that's good and stable for working on it tomorrow and i think i can finish up the rest of it tomorrow without too much trouble just this one thing needs to sit overnight i think okay the way we're going to attempt to fix this this is a hairline crack but it is definitely all the way through the top so the way i'm going to fix that is i'm going to run water down in the crack water will penetrate when the glue won't and if you soak it with water first there's a good chance that the glue will go down in there a lot better and some people would say well you're going to make the joint weak but not really you're not getting that much water going on in a thing like this you're just trying to find a a path for the glue to follow that's all this is and the glue will follow the water much easier than it will going in there dry and there's just not that much water going down in there so now we'll take glue i'm going to see if i can actually squeeze it force it down in there with the glue bottle a little bit work it up and down like that and the glue will also get in the crack a little bit better and then i've got the little suction cup to try to force it in there a little bit that helps a little also especially if you can spread the crack a little bit i'm going gonna look inside to see if i can see any penetration at all it's doubtful to be honest but i'm gonna see well i can see a little bit of water staining there where the water has come through but i don't actually see any glue try a little more glue a little more suction action a lot of people talk about syringes i can't get the syringe thing to work very well for me i know other people seem to be able to get it to work great but for me the syringe thing's just more hype than it is reality for me i mean there are certain circumstances where the syringe is the only tool but they're rare yeah i can see glue squeezing out now let me see if i see anything on the inside now truthfully i don't you know this would have been a candidate for ca glue there's no doubt about it but the problem with the ca glue is that it could really hurt the this old finish and i don't want to take a chance on that it's not worth it in my opinion to take that chance take that risk and end up messing up an old finish so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to take a brush a little stiffer brush and i'm going to try to poke the glue down in there a little bit more sometimes that works too ah i can actually see white glue coming out in there now yeah there's three three little drops so little tiny bubbles or or whatever you want to call it so that's making me feel a little better know that we're getting it in there some it's those three bubbles are up in this area up here so we're going to work on the back area a little more and i just used the wrong brush try to just force it down in there basically see if that helped anymore no no not really the back part of this doesn't seem like it's going in there is as good all right that's probably as good as i'm gonna be able to get it i think it's probably sunk in there sufficiently anyway i can actually see a little bit more glue way back there now but not much i do think we've got enough in there that'll make it work trying to make the bottle act like a syringe a little bit okay so i'm gonna get me a clamp put across here now and i think we'll see some squeeze out come out of there well i think you can probably see the glue squeeze out there on the line it's not very much definitely squeezing out there i think you can see the line of it right then through here and it goes all the way to the back end i'm going to look inside now and see if that caused the glue to squeeze out with the clamp on there oh yeah oh yeah all the way almost like i said almost all but the last little tiny bit right here i can see squeeze out on the inside and it's it's about the same amount it's a very minute amount so it's not like it's a big deal now i'm going to wipe across that and see if we can feel the crack i think the crack is pretty well level yeah it feels like it is so i think we're good shape now this sound hole is made in such a way that i can only get my hand in going this direction because of this thing here so i had to put my hand in this way and then turn my wrist around once i get it in there and then i got to get this rag in there and i'll get in there and wipe off the glue on the inside this is a very tiny sound hole yeah that's good i can't get my hand back out because of that so i have to turn my hand back around and go out that way that little knob right there nails you okay let me look inside one more time just to make sure it's clean i think it will be though oh yeah it's perfect it's just perfect so we're in very very good shape there on this crack now knowing that we got glue all the way through i've got a piece of leather here under this clamp these clamps look big and bulky but they're aluminum and they're hollow to boot so they're very lightweight they're just a cheap harbor freight clamp but they work great for things like this so i'm just going to let that set overnight and do its thing because that way it'll be really strong and i won't have to worry about that anymore so while that crack is sitting there i thought i might just spend a couple more minutes not very much time but just a couple of minutes looking at this truss rod being that this is a 1912 guitar it surprised me that it even had a truss rod but then i looked online and many of this style guitar have truss rods so i guess that's a common thing for this guitar just wanted to see how it was made it looks like it is just a typical hex nut i'm going to see if i have a wrench that will fit it and i do looking down at there's a considerable under bow i was hoping that this would be loose it is a little loose it's not real loose but it's not real tight either that may be all i need to do to get rid of that underbow because it is a fairly significant underbow yeah i can still see it now i just saw it by eye and i could tell it was pretty significant and with the straight edge on there right now well let's just see if we can tell how many thousands it is i would say it looks like it's 15 or 20 000 still even after tightening it it might be even more than that i don't know maybe not well no it's not too bad right now yeah actually it's about fifteen thousandths that's that's what i figured it probably was somewhere in that ballpark yup about fifteen thousandths so to me i would take some more of that out of there if i could and i think i'll tighten this up a little bit more and see if we can tell now now it's just barely does go under there now but it's still it's probably still at least 12 thousandths i would like to see it get almost perfectly flat because i figure the strings will pull it back in there that's about all i've got there on strength to tighten it that is significantly better we're probably ten thousands now or so i may let that relax overnight and let it sit there like that and try tightening it some more in the morning good morning my friends it's day two of working on this masterfully engineered old antique 1912 guitar it is fun to work on something like this that crack that used to be there is pretty much gone you can still see it of course lightly but you kind of got to be looking for it now and once we polish and buff out the top it might even go away a little bit more but it is definitely solid no problem at all so we move on to the next hardest job on this and that is fixing this and this could actually be the hardest job um yeah we just have to see how it goes all right so this is the part we're working on here it's definitely loose it is definitely not going back in there i could push as hard as i want to push and it will only break it will not bend and go back in that slot i guarantee you that i'm getting out the heat gun i get you know reamed all the time people say oh you burnt it or you melted it or you did this or you did that and the truth is this thing is infinitely adjustable it goes from cold air to incredibly hot air and i can adjust it however i think it's necessary right now i'm blowing it on my hand to test how hot it is [Music] you can tell it's not very hot because i'm holding my hand there now for how long has it been i don't think that's quite hot enough to get the plastic soft enough so i'm going to try to turn it up just a little bit that might be warm enough i don't know it's not real hot i would say the temperature on this is like the hottest setting on your hair blower right now i can tell there's a little more give to it already i'm gonna heat the longer piece of this in hopes that it'll stretch [Applause] back to its original position i don't really think it's warm enough yet but it is stretching a little bit now it's not going to be soft enough to stretch that far though you i don't know if you can see how far it still needs to go but it's quite a ways yet and it's not going so i don't know probably the best thing to do is just to cut it as you can see it's already been cut on this side and somebody's already put it back together that way with a gap i don't like that but honestly i don't think it's going to stretch i'm going to turn the heat up a little bit more try it one more time [Applause] it's pretty warm but i don't think it's really going to work i'm tempted to try it with the glue and the rubber band around it and see if that will hold it i kind of think it might but honestly i think it'll just shrink and when it cools and pull back out i really don't think it's going to last it's pretty tight right now i still cannot get it all the way in there so to me that indicates you better just try something else it's just not really wanting to cooperate sometimes i've had success where you just push them right in there no problem not so much on this one it's really not going and i'm afraid if i heat it up much more i might actually catch it on fire some of this old binding is incredibly flammable and i imagine this is part of it as bad as i hate it i'm going to cut it and push it in there glue it and we'll fill it with another piece that's i think that's the best option unfortunately i think that's about the only option so i think i'm going to cut it with these side cutters here and they do a pretty good job you can try sawing this but you know you can actually scratch something or make the problem worse so i think you're better off just breaking it there you can see that it's close but it just didn't want to go so now we'll do our best to find a piece of binding that we can fit in in both places and make it more or less disappear now for the touchiest part of the operation i have cut this little tiny piece of plastic if i can get the camera to focus on that probably not anyway i am going to try to force that into the crack i have actually cut a tiny kind of a bevel on it on both sides so that it can go in and wedge itself in there tightly i think it might go but it's honestly hard to say i also straightened these edges off this is the one that was already broken so anyway the problem with this is getting it to fit tight and making the seam go away and so i'm going to use this beacon 527 glue which actually melts the plastic and once the plastic is sufficiently melted then i believe the patch will go in there and melt to it i am moving the glue around in there with a toothpick and it would be nice if the guitar would sit on its side there but no it won't so i have to work and hold the guitar at the same time and now i'm going to try to force this down in there i could not get it in there dry but i thought it was so close to going that i thought if i melted the other two pieces of plastic it will go and it did and yet it still is fighting me this is a leather working tool that has been invaluable for working on instruments i use it all the time for pushing and smoothing and rounding and it's just it's for making indentations and things in leather it's just really handy pulling stitches through with this in but it's just a great tool for working on old instruments too i use it all the time there i got it down in there where i want it with that tool now granted it's not a perfect color match but you know you can't have all of the bindings in all the colors and the sizes there's just no way for matching things like this i wish i did but i don't and i chopped off the extra little piece there so it's getting in there we will let that set now and relax and it should dry and then once it's dried we should be able to make it go away a little bit better by smoothing it off now we'll work on this side now the complexity on this side is i can't keep this open because it's not glued already i could go ahead and glue this one in place and then force that one in and that might be the easier way to handle it but i'm going to try to do it all at once just because i'm a glutton for punishment so i'll try cutting another piece that hopefully will fit in that slot i had actually cut a piece and i thought it would work but i it just seemed like it was not the right size i'm going to try it again just to see if maybe i wasn't holding my mouth right the first time because it sure seemed like it should fit it actually does fit but i'm not sure it's tight enough it's real close to being tight enough it's so perfectly close that you could probably get away with that but when you look at it up real real close there's little tiny gaps now they're kind of going away actually i think it'll work once i force it all toward that it's pinching it pretty well and once i put the softening glue on there i think it'll actually work the problem with this one is i need to glue the whole thing and i don't want to glue it with this because this stuff will eat up the finish you got to be very careful with this stuff so i think i'm more or less going to do what i said i didn't want to do and that is i think i'm more or less going to tack it in place with this super fatty glue once it's kind of holding itself there then i'll force this into place with this kind of glue simple but complicated just like always this piece is loose all the way to the tip which is you know you you could argue you could just put it all back in one piece but the problem is i don't have anything that matches that well and i would just assume use the original piece even though it's short the advantage of this stuff is that it's water soluble so it's water cleanup therefore you don't have to worry too much about making a mess on the finish that seems to be tacking up and holding that fairly well now if i can do the same thing on this side this side doesn't seem to want to hold quite as well at least in the early stages i think if i hold it there still for a few minutes it'll probably stay in place what i'm wanting to do is get the rubber on there so i want to get this glued up with the beacon 527 as quick as possible and it never fails but the beacon 527 is spewing out of the end of the tube right now when it's the most critical time and i'm poking the beacon 527 glue down in there to soften the tips of that binding and now i'm going to force this piece back in there and the tricky part on this is getting it turned the right way because it's almost a perfect shape now it doesn't seem to want to go which is par for the course okay i think that's in pretty good shape so now i'm going to get the rubber bands and rubber band this up for about 30 minutes or so and let that glue set well my friends i have got the binding all fixed there you can you can see the patch but you know it's not too bad and it's stable now i think that's the key thing i also stabilized this little area right back in here with some ca glue because these were kind of moving a little bit right here where this little decorative strip goes through the ends were coming loose but i think they're fine now so i think that was good call i haven't looked at the neck joint here yet but this has been repaired someone who did it did a pretty nice job they put a pin through here i think they said he put i think they put a bolt or screw or something through here and then they covered it up with this plug and carved it back so they did a nice job on that i'm wondering if that's going to be solid when we string it up but i think it will be i've also you know tightened the truss rod again this morning after i tightened it yesterday so everything should be straight on the neck now i'm going to do a light fret dressing real quick and polish these frets up i'm not going to film that because i've filmed it so many times in other videos but basically i'm just going to lightly level all the frets and then i'll use a recrowning tool to re-crown them and then i'll buff them out with some like 600 sandpaper to make them nice and smooth well my friends this fretboard is coming loose on this guitar and it's actually loose quite a ways back i don't know if you can see here but i imagine i can take that paper a long ways you can see it goes up that far sticking in there and probably could go further i have a feeling it's just all loose tightening the truss rod as i did you know could have had something to do with that i don't know that it did i noticed it loose after i started filing the frets i could feel the fretboard move that's how i knew it was loose so i don't really know if tightening the truss rod caused it or not but it could have it's possible anyway i'm holding it up a little bit with that little piece of leather there you can see and i'm going to get in there with a flat blade and try to clean it out as best i can and squirt glue in there and then we'll clamp her back down i think it'll be fine so here we go i was looking for this tool caleb had it and he has put sandpaper on both sides you know ordinarily that might not be what i want but right now it is i think it's going to work just fine we're getting in there and cleaning this out [Laughter] yeah there's quite a bit of stuff fell out of there so i think it's in pretty good shape i don't feel anything in the way so i think the best thing to do is just get the glue in there and clamp her back down all right i think maybe this thing will cooperate now and i'll get glue down in here i think that's pretty good i don't think that's going to be a problem we'll do a little cleanup here and clamp that down as you can see the glue is squeezing out there and it's looking pretty good i think we've got a good job there a good contact so i'm going to go ahead and get that clamped up i'm going to use these clamps these are can put a lot of pressure on there and i want to make sure i do get quite a bit of pressure on there they've got rubber ends on both ends and i'm putting a piece of leather on the underside because the underside is typically softer wood and could dent so i've got leather between it also and that looks good the squeeze out on it is just about right it looks like it's all going to clamp up fine the only negative is since this is a rust job i'm going to have to wait about an hour before i continue well my friends the nut popped off of this during all the work on this uh loose fretboard and what's cool about this nut is that it is mother of pearl now it's tarnished to the point where you couldn't tell that on the top you know and so i'm just gonna clean it up i've got some this is 220 sandpaper here and i'm just gonna clean it up a little bit with that and that makes it look real nice and clean again and then we might need to go to a finer grit to polish it back up anyway it's uh looking pretty nice that you don't see the mother of pearl as the nut very often i mean it it's not that uncommon but on the other hand you don't see it real often so it's going to be nice to have that on there looks really cool once again i'm going to clean this old binding it's just gotten cruddy over the years if you look at this right here you watch how it'll change when you go over it with the scraper and all you're doing is scraping off the junk and it looks so much better when you do that and i'm scraping it very lightly i'm really not taking off any plastic i've only taken off the crud that's just accumulated over the years and some of it is probably a little bit of finish to be perfectly honest with you but it's gotten to the point where you can't really even see how nice looking the binding is so to me once it gets that bad it's no longer patina it's more like creeping crud and now you can actually see the ivroid pattern that's in the bindings you could not even see the ivroid in there before [Music] couldn't see it at all it just looks one color now it just looks so much better and that will also probably make it match the little pieces i put in better too here's a nice big nick in the binding it's a shame that has to be there it's a big fairly large nick in the binding right here and if i could get that out it would be nice but honestly it's almost impossible to get that out so what i'm trying to do is just round it over smooth it out just kind of like again like taping drywall you just fade it you know you just feather it out and that's kind of what i'm doing here instead of a deep gouge i'm trying to feather it a little bit and then you won't hardly see it get rid of the dirt that's down in there really deep that looks much better to my eye and i'm not going to show the whole thing of cleaning this but i'm going to clean it all and let you see what it all looks like when we're done well my friends i've done all the cosmetic cleaning all the binding all the way around everywhere inside here everywhere and it looks pretty nice i didn't try to make it look brand new nice i just cleaned the creep and crud off of it i think while i was doing that i think i've defined the difference between creep and crud and patina is if the creep and crud distorts the design in other words you can't see the design in the object then it's creep and crud if you can see the design in it then it's patina and you could not see the design in the binding and things like that it was gone so to me that's just creep and crud so we got rid of it my next dilemma this saddle has been broken and he has glued it back and or somebody has glued it back and you know it's probably fine you know i don't know that i really want to make a new one of those but i could i guess maybe i should just to have it as a safeguard but more than that the height of this is just looks ridiculous right now now it may change when i put strings on here but right now it looks totally ridiculous when you lay this straight edge on here right down the fretboard this straight edge is a full and i'm not exaggerating a full 3 8 of an inch below the top of this which would mean if you elevate that up to the string height then you're going to have at least a 5 16 inch gap down here that's more than a quarter of an inch quarter of an inch is 250 thousandths add about another 60 000 to that you're talking roughly 310 or so thousands a little more than that even and that's really high considering that typically down here a hundred thousands is considered relatively high so it's three times the normal height that's just based on eyeball look measurements at the moment haven't actually put strings on it to measure it but that's that would be my guess right now would be that high above the fretboard i haven't oiled the fretboard yet the other thing that's weird about this is how cock-eyed it is can you see how cock-eyed it is see how thick the bridge feet is here and the foot is very thin here so it's when you set it on a flat surface it's setting at an angle like that of course i'm exaggerating but that's what it's doing when you set it on here and you look down this it's sort of close it's not real close but it's not terribly far off either i would say the fixed side is still high compared to the level of this so if this is all high well the one thing i am going to try to do is level this out a little bit um i'm just debating on whether i need to spend the time the customer's money to make a new one of these because that's not an easy thing to make and make it look original i guess so basically i would be making an original copy an original reproduction which is kind of like jumbo shrimp oxymoron but i'm just debating whether that's strong enough to hold the strings i think it is actually i don't think i need to spend my time on it but you never know by the way caleb and i have just been talking back and forth and we don't think this is the actual original bridge there's two or three reasons why we don't think it's the original bridge the main reason just being simply the patent date that's on the back here what the patent date actually says is january 18-21 so that would either mean 19 18 to 1921 or it means january 18th 1921 either one of those dates is long after this guitar which is roughly 1912. so we don't think this is the original bridge though it may be for all we know we're going to clean up this now and get the creep and crud off of here the customer asks that i make this look better the problem with this is that it's been plated here and the plating has come off so yeah i can clean it up but it's not going to look you know that much better to be honest i do think it needs to be cleaned up but i don't think it's gonna look all that terribly uh great in terms of one consistent color or anything when i get done bill i already know some of you won't like this at all now this is still nickel colored you know and the the wires appear to have some nickel coloring on them still but this piece here all of the nickel has gone off of there you know it was just flaking off it was just almost like powder and there was no saving it so i did the next best thing and that is just buffed it out to a almost mirror finish in the brass it looks nice you know brass always tarnishes and turns dark so it'll do that over time but anyway it is cleaned up now and it is ready to go back on the guitar and then we can start to understand how high the strings are because i do think they're going to be very high i thought i would point out an interesting thing about this this can only go on this tailpiece one way so you can't turn it around or do anything like that the bevels for the string buttons are in the front here so you think well why would that be you know you think well turn it around and so there is no way to turn it around there's no holes on this side you know i pretty much figured this out on my own i said well the string has to go over the top come underneath and then hang in this hole well sure enough caleb looked it up and that's how they used this particular tailpiece they did do it that way so that's the way we're going to be doing this it's going to look a little weird to some folks i'm sure but that is the way this tailpiece is designed and sure enough that's the way they're supposed to use it so enough talk let's get started with that two more things i wanted to point out on this guitar before i start putting strings on it if you were to go straight down the center of this tailpiece after it's connected up here it would come off this direction i mean it i'm exaggerating a little bit but the straight on would be like this so it's missing the neck altogether in other words it would have to be over about that far to be lined up with the neck so i'm sure the strings will pull it over there but i just thought that was kind of strange that just connecting it up raw without strings it's not lined up down the center line at all that's point number one point number two here is this is the original tail pin it's been glued back together you know this is a very important thing if a person puts a strap on here you don't want this to fail because the guitar will hit the ground and bust it into pieces so i'm going to make a new tail pin and it'll be a very nice high quality tail pin out of ebony and this one can just be kept with the guitar for keepsake purposes but this is not real easy to do to be perfectly honest with you sometimes the peg shavers work on things like this and sometimes they don't let me just see if i can get the shaver to work on this don't think it's going to honestly it might looks like it is actually i tried turning this with the plastic pliers considering my hands are just not up to the task these days well this is where i start doing this by hand because i'm afraid it's gonna fit sloppy if i don't i always look and see where the shiny parts are after you put it in there and you spin it wherever it is becomes shiny that's where it's touching and you just need to get rid of that shiny part so i'm scraping that off and i try to be real even on my scraping there i put it back in turn it again and knock off just the high spots this ensures the angle that it's going in on is exactly the same by doing it this way where this and that the angles may not match but at least i took the big bulk of it off with the uh shaver and now i can take the rest of it off this way now you just pretty much gotta have patience to do this it's a lot of trial and error but it works better than any other method i can think of and it just flat guarantees that the peg will be absolutely perfectly tight when you're done it's kind of like the carbon paper deal with setting a neck you have to know what you're looking for and you can definitely see it shine where it's rubbing if you know what you're looking for in fact i'll show you the difference before and after i'll clean it off and then i'll show you what it looks like clean and then put it in and twist it maybe you can see what i'm looking at all right so that's what it looks like clean now look mostly at the end down here it's from about midway down is really what you're going to be looking at because that's where this one's rubbing so look at that and it's nice and clean no it's just kind of dull colored all one color now watch after i put it in here and twist it you'll probably be able to see some shininess to it in that area and now hopefully you can see the shininess and the shininess is what you have to cut off i don't know if that's coming across on the video because i cannot tell just looking at the viewfinder but anyway that's what i do i can see it with my eye as plain as day but it does take a while to do it this way and there's no doubt about it you know if you had a shaver that was exactly at the right taper for this particular instrument then it would be fine i could just use the shaver but if i kept going with the shaver this would have some sort of a loose fit by the time it got in there this way it'll fit absolutely completely perfectly tight all the way the full length of the peg it goes in just a little further each time you do it [Applause] this method believe it or not keeps you shaving it smooth believe it or not because you think well you would start shaving one side more than the other or whatever but all the shiny parts is what you take off and so if you're carving it uneven that unevenness will show up as a shiny part and now we're up to about this depth right here so we're about this deep into it right now we need to get where we're just about a sixteenth of an inch or less from there and then we can tap it in the rest of the way i'm actually shaving the full length of it this time because i think it's starting to get a little bit of a bulge up at the big end and so this will help it go in further i also want to get this end pin in there before i string it up and the reason is that it actually does help hold that tail piece by design so i don't really want to string it up with just the little three screws holding it yeah we're getting very close now we're eight eighth inch away probably and the problem is if you drive it in there like that you can split the whole block and bust it so you don't want to do that you want to get real real close to having it a tight fit before you drive it in that last little tiny bit i kind of think it might go this time it's so very close i'm pretty sure i could tap it in yeah i think i can tap it in now in fact i can just push it in the rest of the way there it is so it's in there trust me you're not pulling that out of there once you get it in there like that it's not coming out it seriously i wouldn't be afraid at all to grab a hold of that and hold the whole guitar up by the end it will not come out not easily anyway the only way you can get these back out now take these screws out put little wooden wedges under the metal plate here and it'll pop it out eventually but that's about the only way you'll get that out of there i'm going to go ahead and use the saddle that's here right now if it turns out that it looks like it's going to be a problem i'll make a new one the only other thing i'm going to do is put the linseed oil on this that's the boiled linseed oil everyone always asks me which oil do i use it's the boiled linseed oil that's the only kind i use i just put all six strings on i don't have them tightened up enough yet they're all real loose but just looking at the general setup of it and i was definitely correct this is high enough you could not only throw a dog through here but i think you could actually throw a saint bernard through there it's really high i don't know how well that'll show up but it's super high just as an example this gauge only goes up to 150 thousandths and i'm pretty sure the whole gauge will go under there without any problem yeah yeah i think it's hard to tell but i you know i think the gauge will go under the see it doesn't even touch right there that's the handle so the handle goes under there so it's really high [Applause] the trick is trying to decide how much to take off to get it where you want it okay so i'm going to tune it up to pitch that way i can get a more accurate measurement if it's 150 000 too high we'll have to take off 300 thousands back here i mean i don't really know how too high it is i don't think it's quite that too high but it's pretty high so we'll see here in a minute once we tune it up okay so the small e is a hundred and twenty five thousands high uh not high but that's the height of it is 125 thousands should be around 80 so that's quite high this one should be around a hundred and it's at 200 so it's twice as high as it should be on this side on the base so you know exaggerations maybe a skinny saint bernard you could throw through there but i you know probably not a full-grown saint bernard but regardless you could throw something through there it's pretty darn tall it really is it's unplayable really in my opinion at the first fret it's i'm a little concerned that it may just be too low once i drop it back here at the bridge because it's not real high at the first fret already so when i drop it down here that much it might be too low at the first fret a little concerned about that but we've got to do what we have to do and i'm going to take it off the feet because the feet are so unlevel as it is that'll level up the feed a whole lot so now we have to do the math i want this to be 80 000 so that is 45 thousands too much on the little e side and i want this to be a hundred thousands so that's a hundred thousands too much on the big e side and i really kind of want it to be ninety thousand so it's really a hundred and ten thousands too much i'm just going to go for it it's that's a lot that we're going to go for it so i have to double both of those numbers so over here we're 45 thousands too high so i'm going to need to take 90 thousandths off of the treble foot over here we're a hundred and ten thousands too high so i'm going to need to take off 220 thousandths that's a quarter of an inch off of this side crazy for my millimeter friends divide those numbers by 40 and you'll have approximately the millimeters so 220 divided by 40 and i'm not gonna do that on camera so there you go uh anyway wow i don't know if i can get that much off of this i could but it would just make a mess out of it i'm sure so i don't think i want to take that much off of this i don't think this is the original bridge and that may be part of the problem so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take some of it off of the foot of the bridge in an attempt to even up the feet and then i'm going to have to take some off of the bottom part of the saddle i think it's going to be a complicated adjustment so here i go well the truth of the matter is i can't take enough off of these feet in order to make this where i want it so i took off 90 thousandths off of this foot and i took 50 thousands off of this foot that gets me part of the way there but not that close i'm going to try to take off the rest of it off the bottom of the saddle but first i'm just making sure that the feet are sitting really flush and by just sitting the sandpaper on there and leaving the string tension pushing down on the bridge as you slide this back and forth it really does make the feet make perfect contact and that's what you want you want as perfect to contact as you can get on the top and that looks really good you can see probably that it's sanding off pretty evenly there's a little light spot there in the middle there could be a little tiny air gap there but it's pretty darn close okay so i think what i'm going to do is tune it back up to pitch yet again see where i'm at now that i can actually measure it with my gauge better and then i'll know how much i need to take off of this saddle to make it work well the adjustment that i made helped it a lot more than i thought it's about 140 on this side now and about 95 or so on this side so we don't need to take a lot more off of the treble side but we do need to take you know a good chunk off of the base side yet so i'm going to take that off of the feet of the saddle this time and i think that we can get it down to where it's pretty darn reasonable caleb was playing around on the guitar and i thought he was picking something there that i thought you all would like to hear on it so here he goes [Music] [Applause] [Music] woohoo well that was pretty nice thanks caleb well my friends we are finished with this old 1912 style oh guitar oh my goodness is this thing a beauty or what you really would have to look a long time to find one in this good shape in this good of original shape without a ton of repairs yeah we've got one little repair right there one repair here on the neck and that's about it the the binding has been repaired a place or two but binding hardly counts in terms of structure there's only two repairs that i know of on the guitar it's in really good shape the fretboard is just looks like brand new really i mean look at the fretboard there it just looks like a new fretboard it's not war there's no pits i have got the action down to where it's really decently playable i seriously doubt it's ever been this playable the action on the uh on the treble side is uh right around 85 000 which is just really good for an acoustic guitar i think on the base side it's a little high about a hundred hundred and ten thousands at the most but still in all when you're only talking say fifteen thousands too much high that's three human hairs it's not very much so it sounds like a lot but it's not very high so you know in terms of playability compared to where this thing was when it came here it's almost perfect now we really didn't do a lot of work on that bridge that old tailpiece shined up really nice see that the back of the guitar i don't know if i've even shown it to you but it's just really super nice it's just clean you know just as clean and nice a guitar as you'd ever want to find and this is samson and samson is the owner of this guitar and i ask him to sit on camera here with me and talk a little bit about the history of this old guitar what he knows about it my dad's guitar yeah and if he was living he'd be 122 years old and he bought that guitar when he's a teenager wow and that's something yeah that's really something and i'm i'm the child of 17 kids i'm number 16. he's number he's the 16th child one mom and dad yeah wow one one mom and dad wow viola is living yet there's only five now living wow that's well that's something that's it's sad in one way uh but lord really been good to us this is a great guitar i really think this is a final guitar uh it's one to be proud of for sure samson's a real big fan of the gospel music so we're going to play a little gospel tune here for you there are people who would rather live in mansions people who'd rather live alone people who betrayed god's promise for the glories to hold their people who would rather live in splendor and brag about the silver and their gold but i'd rather have a little old cabin by this side of the road i'd rather live by the side of the road and try to point souls to their blessed abode [Applause] than to be a king or a millionaire and live in a mansion in bright rain i'd rather do an average day for a traveler here or a friend of me i'd rather live by the side of the road and help some people along this way and help some people come along last way [Music] need old guitar [Music] let you hear it just by itself so you can hear [Music] if you enjoyed this video please be sure to give us a thumbs up if you're not yet subscribed please click the subscribe button thank you so much for watching

Channel: Rosa String Works

Views: 36,987

Rating: 4.9633026 out of 5

Keywords: Rosa String Works, instrument repair, Jerry Rosa, setup, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, violin, luthier, Martin, Gibson, Taylor, Alvarez, Kay, Bluegrass, music, hand carved, top crack, fret job, fretboard, handmade, 1912, heirloom, Style O, Binding repair, tailpiece

Id: 6H4ePrNg4HE

Length: 63min 2sec (3782 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020