497 RSW Regal Wreck 2 Deja Vu All Over Again P2

[Music] well back up the truck you know this i said this brace was only loose in that one little spot and i thought it was but once i cleaned all the glue around the edges this whole end is loose too this one i still can't find fault with other than well i mean i found fault from here to here but the rest of it seems completely solid so i don't see any reason to mess with this one this one here i'm not so sure about it's loose here and it's loose here so that means only a little bit of this is being held it looks like so back up the truck here let's see if we can take this one out i think it probably needs to come out what's happened is it's been re-glued right in this area i can tell and uh that's kind of got it and it's not glued down tight let me uh talk about the gluing and the clamping one more time here and say it a little differently so that you can understand what my real point is here you know i'm not trying to sound like i know everything because that's not the point here i can tell you for sure that there are some things you can get away with and some things you cannot get away with when it comes to gluing many people i think have the mistaken idea that like they'll see a brace that's loose maybe it's got a little tiny crack in it their their idea is if they fill that crack with glue uh let it dry then it's glued well sort of kind of maybe a little bit but the truth is that's never a strong bond whenever you have a crack there and you've got glue filling the crack that glue will eventually crack itself it will crack it will always give up the ghost eventually whereas if you put those two pieces together tightly like that with glue in between them and you clamp it and leave it until that glue really cures then you've got a strong bond it's a big difference leaving that little tiny gap even if it's only the width of a hair is a huge difference of clamping it up tight so that's what i'm really saying and that's what's happened here um this just didn't get clamped up tight i can tell based on what i'm saying it just didn't bond very well it a little bit right in here where it's been re-glued but but you know it's a mess so we're going to clean that all up now and clean this all up and we'll put it back together properly this one brace as i mentioned is loose about halfway and the rest of it seems completely fine um you know i'd probably do more damage actually on this one taking this one apart than i would just gluing it here and leaving how do i how do i recognize the difference it's just a solidness recogni you know as i was popping the glue along the edges this didn't indicate any kind of movement whatsoever uh all the rest of it kind of did you know you could kind of just tell by the sound by the feel that the rest of it wasn't solid except for like in those little bitty places where i pointed out and i pointed them out before i broke it loose and you could see that that was the solid part well this feels to be solid all the way so i don't think this is a problem area but because this is loose here i'm going to get glue under this area and i'm going to clamp it with this not the go bar clamps because i want this by the way i've also taken some flat kind of flat edged scraping tools and scraped this whole area really good to get rid of the glue residue that's under there so i've already done that i've also scraped and cleaned this whole top so it's smooth and got rid of all the glue residue so anyway i'm i'm ready to go ahead and glue this one back and i will get glue in here and i'll use a paint brush or whatever i got to do to get the glue back under there really good i'm only going to apply the glue from the one side so that i can see it come through the other side and i know it's penetrated all the way where if you if you apply it on both sides you really can't tell if it's penetrated underneath there see i like to use a brush in a case like this because the brush will the bristles will go right back under there no problem already you can start to see it squeezing out on the other side there so i know i'm getting good penetration the brush really helps you with that and everybody has their own technique that's just the way i do it you could do a whole bunch of different ways of accomplish the same thing okay and then if you pump it like that that will also get the glue back in there really good now here i'm going to go ahead and put a little glue right up in this crack because it's a little more difficult to get the glue right up to the point where it's where it is already stuck but otherwise i think we're fine i'm gonna get something and clean all that up some people tell me to let that dry and scrape it off later but i prefer to wash it off and if you wash it two or three times then you don't leave any glue residue i prefer to do it that way i know other people prefer to but since especially since i made such a mess there spreader spreading that all around i like to wash it up ahead of time now if i had left just a little glue line that would be different the reason i want to do this with clamps versus the go bar system the go bar thing works great for large areas and things but when you got a real specific spot that's that is a problem these clamps will do a much better job and i'm putting leather on the under side on the finished side as you can see you can really see it squeezing out there now well i have the opportunity i thought i'd go ahead and put a cleat on this repair that the customer had made it was glued with ca glue which is suitable and fine but by putting a cleat across this with the titebond glue i think that will solve it in fact i think i'll put two cleats you know i think this will make it really strong and don't have to worry about it again and there's already this is kind of a cleat in itself this brace and then i'll put one this is about an inch away and then i'll put another one about another inch away okay we'll just let that all sit in peace and harmony for a couple hours and then we'll be ready to go on well there's what the regal inside looks like after i put in that new brace and this is kind of a standard brace in most guitars so it's not unusual to have that in there of course it doesn't match color wise that helped flatten this area a tiny bit i ain't going to lie to you and tell you that it's perfect because it's not but i don't think it'll get any worse now compared to at least compared to the way it would have had i not put that in there and also having this brace glued back down of course makes a lot of difference too so you know having both of those glued in tight it really did flatten this area as a matter of fact most of that under bow that was right here is pretty much gone i don't know if you can see it or not but it's pretty flat now comparatively the negative is uh and i don't know why but when i look down the plane of this and look down to the uh peg head down that way it looks like the neck angle is very high so it looks like it would probably need a neck reset i'm going to avoid that if i can one of the things i want to do is put a bridge plate on this i may leave that and do that separately with clamps because i want to work on the back braces and i'll use the go bar system for the back braces and i can always put the bridge plate in here with clamps through the sound hole while the other thing is glued up so i'm going to set this aside for the moment and start working on the back this was another one of those situations where you got to do what you got to do i first tried to put this in my little go bar clamp set up and there's just enough radius to this brace here in the back that it just i couldn't get it to clamp right i tried to wedge it i tried every different thing and nothing would work so i just decided to clamp it individually these other three braces or so that go up here i think three more i think they're flat enough and looking down on they look really flat so i don't think there's enough radius in these to care so i think i can probably use the go bar on these other three but this here had just enough radius to make it a problem so i'm just going to go ahead and clamp this one in leave it for a few hours and then maybe get these other ones clamped in yet before i call it a day it's the next day these two set with clamps all night and those two braces are are fine and so i put the next two braces on and i put them in the go bars system because this is pretty flat across right here i have one more brace to put on but this is off of the table here so i'm not gonna put this one on with the go bar until these other two dry so i'll wait a couple hours here and then put this last one on well another day has passed on this uh regal guitar i feel like all the braces on the top are fine i feel like all the braces on the back are fine and even the cleat i put in there i just wanted to point out something here whenever you take braces off you can do as good a job as possible and there will almost always be some minor little air space under there somewhere in a shop talk recently i just mentioned that you know you should never have any air space and have glue well the bottom line is on something like this it's almost inevitable that it's going to happen i glued everything as good as i could clamped it as good as i could and to my eye i didn't see any air gaps i mean it looked good but i thought you know just to be on the safe side i'll take ca glue the thin stuff and run it along the seams on all of these and see if it penetrates through well it did in about three places on about three braces but that's just that added insurance that it'll be glued you know don't get me wrong i don't think these braces would have come loose period even even in 5 or 10 or 20 years i think they'd still be tight but i just wanted to fill those last little bitty voids and ca glue is about the only glue that you can trust to do something like that so that's what i did and i cleaned all that up it's uh you know it's solid i'm not at all concerned about it i just did that as an extra bonus if you will and it's just kind of a shop tip there that you should know that if you take braces off put them back on i don't care how good a job you do there's a very good chance there'll still be some kind of uh area there that's not perfectly tight especially when you're doing a repair like this all that to say i think i'm ready to put the back back on the guitar now i think it's all ready to go i just wanted to show you what the problem i'm going to have you know it lines up really well you know i sawed it off here in most places it's just fine but in a couple of places like the waist here the waist is actually narrower than the back is so i'm going to have to get my hand through the sound hole push that waist out as i clamp and glue this all down just so i'm not getting ahead of myself i got to thinking i ought to make sure i've got everything tight too you know you don't want to get in any hurry putting this back back on here so i noticed the binding was a little loose here and i noticed the binding was a little loose here so i've got those glued up and waiting to dry here i've got some kerf that's loose so i want to get that fixed i'm gonna inspect it for anything else loose up there's another little piece right back here that's loose most of the time on a thing like this i'll take the paintbrush and work it down in there where i can't squeeze the glue down in there and then like i always say pump these things a few times that pumps the glue around these are some more really good clamps from harbor freight very inexpensive and yet very strong and they have rubber on them too which is nice i've got to do a big bridge plate here yet too so yeah i could have gotten ahead of myself so i've got to put this big bridge plate on here yet i'm gonna make that next and we'll get that in here as you saw there i uh you know had forgotten to put in this uh bridge plate until just now and you know people might think well you're you know pretty disjointed or you're not thinking these things through or you're not very organized but you got to realize it doesn't to me on my side of it it's completely different than on your side you're you're watching these videos in order and it's one continuous flow here it's not like that at all i work on something and i might work on two or three other projects like for instance since the last clip you saw i worked on editing a video right over there and so you know it's just there's something in between every step some people say well you should have a checklist well try to make a checklist for every scenario there is in the whole world it's impossible you just can't do it the way i combat that problem is that before i do something that's permanent i stop and i look at everything and i think about it and i tap on everything and i listen and that's the only way you can really you know survive in this type of environment it may look disjointed to you and it may come across that way but it's been working for me for around 40 some or about 40 years now close to it anyway occasionally i make a mistake but i typically know how to fix it if i make a mistake so i'm not too worried about it i'm going to replace this basically with the same kind of thing except that this was spruce which is not a bad choice but i'm going to use padauk it's quarter-sawn padouk i made it slightly bigger all the way around just you know slightly and then i beveled where where that extra you know surround is i just beveled that off to make it look more finished this looks kind of plain and clunky if you ask me but this is all beveled and it looks nice i also left it just a tiny bit thicker and when i say tiny bit i'm talking like eight thousandths thicker but eight thousand spread out over a whole large area like that is a significant amount i've made some plywood calls that i can lay on top of here and clamp it that'll just help stiffen everything up and keep everything flat i could probably use my go bar system for this but honestly the go bar i don't think puts enough pressure on stuff like this especially on a big flat area i've said before many times that your your best gluing technique is to squeeze these things really tightly the go bar won't do that on a big flat thing like this just thought i'd show you something i'm also doing here i was doing it off camera but i've i've toothed this up with a tooth blade in other words i just take a blade like this that has teeth on it and i scratch it up a little bit just to make it a little bit rougher i don't like to make it real rough you know just a little bit and uh you know glass smooth probably doesn't glue quite as well as just having a little bit of surface there and you can see there how much comes off of there so this is just acetone it dries and doesn't leave much residues i'll give this acetone a couple minutes to leach out of there and get good and dry before i glue it it's just time to get her done you know i kind of got a mark here where everything was before so i'll just kind of go by that i also put a pencil mark where i where i want the front of the bridge to end up you can see by these two holes in the top here maybe you could see those holes there was two holes that it at one time had a screwed on type bridge that had been replaced already apparently i don't like any kind of fasteners in my bridges at all i haven't seen nothing but more problems created from those kinds of connections than i have uh you know good things it's always been a problem of some sort it causes your top to crack or something else you know it just creates problems so i only use glue and wood wood connections on on bridges and bridge plates and things i'll do a little bit of measuring just to make sure i'm not way off a center or anything i guess in this case um i'll have to do it like i would do it through the sound hole so i'll put the adjustments on the outside since there is a bridge on there well there's what she looks like all glued up on the clamped up on the inside that's of course what it always looks like on the outside as you've seen in many videos before anyway that will need to set for a couple hours and do its thing i've removed the little clamps off of these these are all dry and i'm pretty sure it's it's really good everywhere else the one thing i'm doing just because i can i guess and that is that i'm going around and i'm knocking out all this dried glue that was in here from the factory and there's a lot of it and i guess the reason i want to do that is if it may show up a problem you know like as i pop this off there could be a place where the top is loose from the sides or anything like that so i don't see as it hurts anything it sure don't help anything to have it in there and since i've got it open and i'm waiting for this to dry anyway i might as well get rid of it well i do think i've finally caught up with this regal guitar and i do think it's pretty solid i have not tapped on it yet i always tap on them before i put them back together because that's where you find out if there's anything else loose because you'll hear a rattle sounds perfect [Music] sounds perfectly solid so that part's good i had some loose bindings on here i glued all those back that i could find but if there's any more we'll hear them now probably that sounds really good and solid too in a perfect world this would meet up perfectly and all i'd have to do is clamp it down i haven't lived in a perfect world in the last 66 years what i'm really concerned about to be truthful is the neck angle it doesn't matter even if this did line up perfectly and i put it back on here perfectly the neck angle could be wrong here's a chance to fix the neck angle before we get this all glued up tight so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put some clamps around this dry and you know get it as mocked up as close to perfect as i can with the clamps on it and then i'm going to do some very good neck angle testing because once you get the glue on here it's all over you can't change that neck angle at all then i have the back attached just dry at the moment no glue with these clamps and it's lining up fairly well based on that lineup i'm checking the neck angle you know it's funny because i checked it a minute ago and it seemed perfect now it's a little bit low if anything depending on how you think of it the it's not clearing the bridge here is what i'm saying and it was clearing the bridge there just a moment ago just barely though and there it is clearing it again so that'll show you how delicate this attachment point is if you don't think attaching the back to your guitar is delicate you are mistaken and you are sadly mistaken because it is very very critical to your neck angle the slightest movement changes your neck ankle that's why taking the back off of an instrument is not nearly as easy as it sounds because everybody says just take the back off just take the back off it's a lot easier yeah okay put the back back on there and see if the neck works still that's where you get a lot of problems in fact a lot of the neck angle or neck resets i've had to do over the years have been because the backs have been removed and the guitars put back together and then the neck doesn't work anymore but this is pretty close right now you do have to pay very close attention to that what i think i'm going to do and i've done it this way in the past is i'm going to start at the back work my way around to these low spots with glue and i'm going to stop there that still gives me a little bit of flex here at this end up here to change the neck angle if i need to by pulling down on it and gluing it and clamping it if i just tried to do the whole thing at once it's pretty much pot luck on whether it's going to work or not for you my friends mere seconds for me a whole weekend snuck in there somehow i'm going to go ahead and get this thing glued up at least up to the waist as i mentioned you want a pretty good amount on here but you just don't want it so that it's just going to squeeze out everywhere the most difficult thing about these clamps is when you're tightening down these wing nuts the whole shaft wants to spin often so it's hard to hold that still and get it as tight as it needs to be there's times when this stuff cooperates and there's times when it doesn't and right now it's not cooperating seems like anytime you get a you're in a hurry because of glue it seems to always give you trouble yeah it's sliding off of there there the the edges of this are slick and this leather makes it slide right off so it's hard to get keep the clamp on there where it doesn't slide off and of course anything that can happen will happen because the peg head bump the little thing of water i had here and knocked water everywhere so those are the kinds of things you actually deal with when you're doing this it's difficult at best to do these things it may look simple and it's not exactly rocket science but yet it it's not all as easy as it may look trying to go to these bigger clamps because the head's bigger it'll won't slide off as easy but they're not quite as long either so they just barely work the finish being on here you know just makes it that much slicker of course i'm trying to keep the edges and the top and the back lined up as well as i can while i'm doing this it really does kind of fight you all the way like right now the waist is moving in here so i'm going to have to get it in a position where i can push the side out to clamp this next couple of clamps much more difficult to do than it may appear i'm pushing on the inside here you can't really see that in the camera but i got my hand in the sound hole i'm pushing the side up and i'm tightening this clamp down you know the old three hand deal you know if you had three hands it'd be easy that's kind of the way this is and then on this side it's going to even be more difficult unless i turn it around where i can get my hand through the sound hole i know you're not really seeing it as well as it can be seen but it's difficult to take time to move the camera when i'm in our time crunch if all the edges are lined up you really won't be able to tell i took this apart because i sawed the back off of it it's a smooth connection there but it is really difficult to get it to clamp back up where you can't feel it either it's it just you would think it would just line right back up and you could just put clamps on it no problem but that isn't really how it works everything changes and flexes and everything's under different tensions the back has its tension the sides have its tension and of course the top has its own tension as well and and that affects how the sides act it just should be easy it's just not that's all i can explain to you so we're just gonna have to give it some time now and let that set and then we can work on the front end of this and also check the neck angle at the same time more than likely if i went ahead and glued it back it would be back just like it was but with all the changes and brace supports and things i made i don't know if the neck angle has changed much or not and it may have so it's really better insurance to check the neck angle before you glue the last little bit on it's only been about an hour since i clamped this all up but in in that hour i went out there and changed the blades on my wife's lawn tractor sharpened up two more sets of blades and videoed a little bit of that to boot so you'll probably see that in a shop talk way before you see this i've been in the last five minutes here checking this to see if it's about right and it is just about right looking when i look down the top the neck down here at the base just roughly in the level area of this and uh so it's it's really pretty good so with that in mind i think i can probably go ahead and get the glue on the rest of this it's always harder to get the glue in it once you glue part of it down obviously doing it by this method is good and bad it fixes problems and it creates problems so you just kind of got to work with it so i'm putting some wedges in there to hold the gap open and i'll get the glue in there as best i can i'm not going to really film all that i'm just going to squirt glue in there and paint it around and then i'll show you what it looks like all clamped up i believe that's going to have to do it just going to try to check the angle here one more time with all the clamps and everything to see how bad it is well it's real close it's you know could i say it's perfect it's hard to say really it's it's pretty close to what i want might have to lower the saddle a little bit and that wouldn't be a terrible thing because that's a pretty darn tall saddle so we'll just have to wait till all the glue dries to see whether i'm smiling or crying well my friends i'm sure for you it's only going to seem like a second for me you could probably multiply that by maybe a hundred thousand seconds it's been a while since i worked on this i don't even know how many days it's been several days just about ready to do something with it i got the clamps off of it i've tapped on it you can hear it solid see there's no vibration now like before everywhere you tapped on this thing it was just a rattle you know and you know the back is glued back on it good now what i'm noticing is there is some glue squeeze out around the seam here and you know there's a close-up of what the seam looks like now keep in mind this one was sawn off in other words i took a saw and actually sawed it off rather than peel the binding off and then peel the back off you know all of that trauma honestly it looks as good or better than anything you would do the other way and it was way cheaper for the customer i've done that before you understand this wasn't the first time i've done that but i may start doing that more often because honestly it's probably the best way to go i mean it really is because it it kind of creates less damage than any other method and it just goes back together so much easier and time is money and looks you know i mean the looks are great i think in fact i don't think i could beat the looks you know if i did it the other way the only thing i got to do now is clean it up and i can you know i can feel the squeeze out and stuff so what i do a lot of times is take a plastic pick one of our wonderful viewers supply this with some plastic razor blades basically they look like single edge razor blades made out of plastic and i'll get some of those and go through here and see if i can pop that glue off the plastic doesn't seem to scratch the finish yet it pops the glue off fairly well so that's what i'll try here so i'm taking one of these little single edge plastic razor blade things and i'm i'm going along the edge like this and you can see the glue popping right off i probably ought to get my safety glasses on because it's actually popping up in the air popping right at my eyes the only negative of these i mean like a guitar pick honestly works just about as good these are a little soft actually and you can maybe see how the edge is getting torn up there i don't know if you can see it right on this edge so what i'm doing is i'm just taking this and and rubbing it on here like that just to clean it up a little bit it's probably quicker to do that than this to just change these really or just as quick i mean i got a bunch of these i could just throw this one away but no point in wasting anything i guess like i said it's just about as quick to do that and it only takes a little bit of that to get it back to shape the cool thing about this is it really doesn't scratch the guitar at all most of the places i had already washed the glue off you know even in those places there's a little film and this seems to be knocking the film off even now here's a spot where the glue is kind of thick honestly i think i'll just take a regular razor blade and go real slow right here i know you can't really see what i'm doing but it's pretty thick right here so i'm just going to get under it and kind of pop it up that seems to have worked well you get the idea i think i've got it pretty well cleaned up i'm going to go around it a little bit maybe do a little bit of light sanding i'm not going to film all that but i'm just going to do a little more cleanup around there and then i think we're ready to start trying to string this thing up and see where it's at the customer felt like it was going to need a neck reset you know i tried really hard to get the neck right as i glued this back back on there so i think it's going to be okay you don't know to you know well as you can probably see i've got the two e strings on the guitar i wanted to check uh several things action and uh intonation and different things and see where we're at this is a little bit high we're about a hundred and twenty two or three thousands on this e string so we can take that down fairly easily there's these the saddle is fairly high on this side it looks pretty good actually it's about 90 on this side so we're really not bad here could go down a few thousands wouldn't hurt nothing but it looks like we're in a buzz situation on the on the nut up here it's if the nuts cut a little low then that's not actually on the end of the fretboard either there's a you probably can't see that very good but there's a gap between the nut and the fretboard and it's a fairly sizable gap actually in fact this probably stand in there yup so you can see that it's standing up in that gap so that's not good either and i may do a real quick light dressing on the frets and now that i know how high this is i'll take the saddle down a little bit so that way i can do it all kind of in one removal of the strings because these strings go through the bridge they're not easy to remove here so i have to loosen it all up up here and just kind of get them out of my way is really what it boils down to that's why i only put the two strings on it because i just don't want to have to deal with a whole bunch of stuff here during this initial setup but i do think i can work with it just like it is i don't think it's going to need a neck reset i'm not sure if it's going to need a new nut once i get this nut straightened up it might be tall enough i don't know but we're going to work on all that here in just a moment i've got the strings loosened up and this nut is somewhat loose it's i can push it forwards and backwards i'm going to see if i can just lift it out of here with my hands it's been loose a long time you can see the dirt and junk that's gotten down in there so i'm going to clean this slot up you know there's a chance i'm what i may do on this guitar again because there's no point in reinventing the whole wheel here i could easily put a little thin shim under this saddle and make it work and that might be the smart thing to do on this guitar in this case i think it might very well be the the wise thing to do and you really wouldn't hardly see it anyway and i think we can stain it to match so i think it's probably the best option rather than spend an hour and a half charge the guy you know 150 bucks to make a new nut because this one seems to be very close in terms of working so i'm going to clean this all up here i'm going to do that off camera just going to scrape it out clean it up clean this up and then we'll glue it back in place here possibly with a shim under it well my friends i cleaned out all the creep and crud between the nut and the end of the fingerboard and there was quite a bit i mean honestly there was a lot of junk there now that i've got the nut fitting up tight to the end of the fingerboard there want hoping against hope that there might be enough clearance looks like it's still going to need a little bit but on the other hand i haven't done a fret leveling yet and i can level these frets a little bit and maybe even lean a little bit toward this first fret it may even be high in fact if i was guessing i'd say it actually was because this one looks lower cut to the fingerboard i just use my typical fret leveling file this is a homemade file that i made this is just a six inch mill bastard file nicholson made in usa just put a little wooden block on it a little piece of maple something that just kind of fits my hand good you know my thumb and and whatever make it kind of ergonomic rounded it off back here to fit back in the palm of my hand but the the key thing about this more so than all of that is that there is no such thing as a flat file in fact i've had people argue with me oh those files are flat you you know and they'll just argue with you and i said no they're really not flat if you look at a file brand new out of a package and you look at it really close with a very detailed eye one side will be concave and one side will be convex you want the concave side the hollow side up the rounded side the convex side down in contact with your frets now we are only talking a mere couple of thousands of an inch you know so you have to look really close to see it but that's the way you want this to work if you want to do a good job with your fret leveling so when you glue this onto your board be sure you do that the other thing is then i take and grind off just the rounded front nose of this so that it doesn't catch on the frets and i round off the back of course so it doesn't catch on the fronts then you can just slide it back and forth just like this and you can actually if you start to develop your feel you can feel the high fret i mean you can seriously feel it and i do feel it grabbing on this first fret and if you look here there's nothing being cut off of this one you probably can't see that because i don't have it zoomed in but it's cutting off of this one here it's cutting off here but it's not cutting off of this fret so that indicates to me that this fret is high so we'll work on that honestly that may solve our problem with the buzzing right there off the nut some people get all hung up about how perfectly level it has to be it does need to be very level that's there's no doubt about that but the point of it is is you can flare it back in other words i can take more off of here and then flare it back very slightly to the end and uh as long as long as the as long as you don't feel this thing grabbing on a high fret you're good like i can feel it grabbing right here i can feel it grabbing a little bit here and definitely here so i mean you can actually feel that it with the file if you're paying attention it's not very hard to feel either it's it's fairly obvious so anyway that's the that's how i do it that's how i use a fret file i'm going to go ahead and do this off camera but i just wanted to show you what i'm doing i've spent a little bit of time only you know maybe a minute or so leveling these it doesn't take very long one thing i thought about talking about is you know this is a radius fingerboard which most all guitar necks are radius you'll find them flat on classical guitars a lot of times but on most steel string guitars the the neck does have a slight radius to it so you obviously have to keep that in mind and you keep this thing moving up and down as you're going like this so you don't just stay in one spot you have to feather it this way and feather it this way just so you understand i think i've got this one up in pretty good shape now it really doesn't take all that much filing on a relatively flat board some of them take a lot of filing of course but this one's not that bad i always clean it off like this first just take a paintbrush and clean it off and now i need to re-crown them all and i'll use the recrowning file i used to always use the recrowning file that fit the fret i have learned that it re-crowns much faster and looks better in my opinion if you use the large recrowning file now the problem with that is these edges stick down too far so i took it over to the belt sander and laid it on there and actually kind of rocked it so that the edges got knocked off i didn't knock off the center as you can see but i knocked off the edges up to the center that way i can go down on lower smaller frets but it re-crowns them much faster i gotta be honest this is the new one from stumac and it doesn't hold it like the old one did i tighten it up all the time and it just doesn't seem to hold it as well if you notice i did actually slip and scratch that there i'm not going to try to hide it it's very minimal scratch but the reason i don't care about that right now is look at this fingerboard up close look at how that's a factory finish and look at all the scratches in it and i can tell you that's from the factory if not it's just was from somebody who really did some sloppy work so i've got to scratch all that out of there anyway i'm not worried about that little minor scratch i just put in there in fact it's very minor compared to the rest of it if your ends are sharp you can also take this and work it at a 45 and it will and and work it around and it will get rid of those sharp ends too the few frets that got extra filing it takes a little more to get their crown up to the peak there but like this one here is pretty low because this fretboard is so scarred up it's even and it does have some finger grooves in it too that we got to take out you know i'm not worried about this one at all and because of that i'm going to take some 400 sandpaper and sand it lengthwise like this and the reason i'm doing that is because it does it it gets these frets really slick much much faster than any other method and you'd be surprised how it rounds them off too it really makes them nice and like i said the fretboard has to be reworked anyway so it doesn't hurt the fretboard at all even though you can see it's turning the fretboard kind of gray that'll all go away here in just a moment this is by far the fastest way to get these frets really looking shiny and clean in fact just makes them almost mirror shiny doing it this way now that i've got all those frets sanded smooth i just want to say this because i know i'm going to get some comments people are going to say you're going to leave scratches in your frets this way well first of all if you look at this 400 grit it's pretty doggone fine there's no sandpaper you can't even feel the grit with your fingers second of all when you're sanding metal it's even finer and third when you're doing this you're moving it back and forth so that the line there is no such thing as a line in line it all gets buffed out you can take your fingernail and rub it on here and you cannot feel it anywhere i imagine i could take the edge of this razor blade rub it across there you can't feel it it's just as slick as snot on a doorknob so there is no lines going this way so you're wasting your time making that comment to me i've been doing it this way for nearly 40 years so take a close-up look at that and see how round round and shiny they are they're really nice it does a really nice job i can still go over these with the semi-chrome and make them even more mirror-like i'm not sure this really warrants that but i may do that right now though i'm going to definitely work on the spaces between the frets because this fingerboard is really chowdered up that one's almost gone not quite gone uh oh here's a little loose piece of binding right here too i just noticed so we need to get that glued back okay i'm only going to show you these first two frets look at the first two frets compared to the rest of them there and you can see the the difference i think now keep in mind these still do have those finger grooves in it you know i don't know if i want to take it all the way out or not but i i want to get it down pretty close but the rest of this has to be done this way and cleaned up and then i may just oil it you know it doesn't look like it's going to look bad this way i thought it was going to turn real light colored but it doesn't look real light it may be okay the way it is without staining it staining it would just take a lot more time and clean up and all that because you'd have to clean up the binding so if i can just oil that the oil will make it a little darker and i think that'll look fine there is a mother of pearl dot and you can go right over those dots too if you're holding your razor blade really tight and then the last thing i wanted to show you before i turn the camera back off and finish this up is that after i do all that then i take the corner of the razor blade and run it right along every fret on both sides so anyway that gets rid of all the fuzzies right up against there makes it a nice neat job then i'll oil it i'll show you when i get to the oiling process what it looks like one more little tip that i just thought of is whenever you have lines that are going perpendicular to your fingerboard and you're scraping it this way well your razor blade likes to catch down into those grooves so that makes it hard to get those lines out of there so what you have to do is you can't your razor blade slightly in other words i'm i'm showing you here and i'm exaggerating it you don't can it that much but you do can't it slightly so that you're not in line with those grooves if you're in line with the grooves you're just going to bump and keep bumping over the top of them if you can't it slightly you won't be in line with them and you can cut them all down smooth so that's a real good tip on how to use your razor blade this little piece of binding needs to be glued back on before it breaks off entirely i've got my canopy glue here i've already scraped the binding and the area to get it clean so i'm just going to spread the glue here just using this exacto knife to get it spread in there behind the plastic i already have uh the fingerboard all plained off with the razor blade i haven't cleaned it up yet but i thought i better get this glued before this ends up breaking off of here so i'm going to wrap this with something i'm not sure exactly what yet i might just use tape i guess that might be the easiest i was thinking about wrapping it all the way around but i think the tape will hold it just fine that will allow me to go ahead and clean up the fingerboard a little bit more i want to clean up all of these frets like this and get rid of all the fuzzies right up against the frets so i'm going to do that again i'll do that off camera as well a little emblem right here and she goes that's jerry's and i said yeah that's jerry's he said i love jerry i was like oh i said you do i said i said we love jerry i said he's awesome that's pretty sweet she's got one of her little tuning keys is loose on her guitar and i told her i said you want me to take your guitar to jerry's to fix that key she goes no no she said let me fix it i'll fix it so she wants to try to fix it but if she doesn't fix it then yeah well that's sweet over yeah it was just so cute just just out of the blue you know my grandson said something almost that sweet except it wasn't a little jerk he's seven years old you know trini in the really smart one yeah he's i was showing him his that glary guitar you know that i was giving to him and i was playing a little bit on it and you know i can't play guitar with a darn and so i made a couple mistakes i said whoops i made a mistake and then i showed him again i said oh sorry i screwed it up again he goes don't worry grandpa you're only buffering just like like a computer buffers he's seven years old i'm going like give me a break you little brat seven years old says that that is awesome you need to say that in a shop i i probably will because that that's just nuts that should be your title right there yeah shop talk i'm i'm only buffering i have cut the saddle down so it ought to be just about perfect now um i've got to get give this some time to set up on this binding so i can't really go ahead and go any further at the moment i went ahead and oiled this as i think you saw and uh i haven't oiled the first fret yet because of the tape but so we're getting we're making progress we got a little time here to wait before we can finish it up so i made myself a shim for going underneath this uh nut and i made it out of ebony and uh it's only 16 thousandths of an inch thick it's pretty darn thin so now i can uh put this in here and i think this is going to be perfectly sufficient nobody's going to really see it anyway and just going to save a lot of time and effort and i can it'll just take a second to cut it down so i'll cut that down and lay it in there i thought you might like to see how i'm going to cut this down or at least i'm going to attempt to cut it down and that is with a pair of scissors i mean it's just a piece of thick paper that's really about all it boils down to that should give us just the right amount of height that we needed because we were basically touching here and sixteen thousandths should just give us about sixteen thousands clearance maybe a little more probably because of the glue etc but it should be pretty close we will probably have to cut it just a tiny bit the groove i mean i'll just use the super fatty glue this glue is the most uncooperative glue on camera i've ever seen i don't think it's ever worked on camera without having to open it up the reason i'm clamping this one i don't normally clamp these but this one here keeps kind of pulling away from from the end of the fingerboard so i'm just trying to keep it in place as it sets up i think that'll do it it looks real good and tight there so i'm just going to go ahead and let that sit for an hour or so i skipped ahead on the regal wreck two i've got the strings on here got them up to pitch i haven't checked the actual action yet it probably is a little bit high but maybe not too much i did reduce the the saddle on the base side specifically but with the nut jacked up a little bit there with that uh tiny shim i put in there it all needs to be looked at a little bit more on this e-string than we need so let's take that down just a hair one thing i've noticed on this is that these nut the slots are not consistent you know i've said before many times you want to keep a very consistent angle you know and you basically want it to mirror pretty much your peg head just kind of be even with your peg head like that and these are anything but even i'm cutting the front you know the front end of this off and the back end here i'm almost leaving where it's at most because these are really filed very flat and the problem with flat is they'll buzz inside of the nut i don't think i actually lowered that any yet um [Music] that was really not cut very well [Music] let's see here it's it's still quite high it takes many iterations of this sometimes to get it just right you don't want to go past it because once you pass it you're you got to make a new nut and then you got trouble that's getting pretty close let's check it back here at the 12th fret just to see where it's at see if it's still real high even after i lowered it down a lot it's still pretty high it's still about a hundred and ten thousands here so we we could go down another twenty thousands back here at the saddle easily you might might have to go more than that take off just a little tiny bit more here hopefully i can get it just right i've got it out of there i'll go ahead and fill this one with the pencil lead this is such a slick plastic that it really doesn't need much that's just perfect right there just perfect and now let's just see where this is at on the final try here still very close to 120 thousands so it still could go down quite a bit 120 down to 90 that's 30 thousandths and so that means 60 more thousands need to come off of here let's see where the treble side is i think the treble side is pretty close well it's up a little bit now let me look at the under bow in the neck now there doesn't seem to be very much under bow but there could be a tiny bit i guess i'll go ahead and file the nut on all of the rest of these i'll do that off camera and get the nut pretty close then i'll check it one more time and then i'll cut this saddle down one more time and we should be good off camera there i finished up the nut and i checked the action here it's about 20 000 high all the way across so that means i need to take 40 thousands off the bridge or off the saddle i should say i've loosened the strings up a lot and i'm hoping i can get this saddle out of here without having to take it all apart i think i can but it's it's going to be a little tight squeeze but ask me if i've ever done this before sure i have so i think i can make it work there we go that got it out of there i gotta mark 40 000 all the way across this thing and take it over to the sander in case you don't remember how i do that put a little black mark on each edge like that you set your calipers at the desired depth that's 40 and a half thousands that'll probably be close enough if you can see a half a thousands you're doing better than me scratch that across there now all you do is you slide that into your sander till both lines just touch the sander very easy to do actually that's the most accurate easy way to to move it well there you have it my friends i believe i've got this thing finished so the regal rec 2 has met its match i still need to oil this first fret i didn't do that which would have been smart if i had done that beforehand i was going to test the truss rod also just to make sure that it is tight i i can see the very faintest hint of a relief in this area and that's okay a hint of relief is what you kind of want but i am going to since i do need to oil this first fret i'm going to do this off camera but i'm going to take take the strings loose one more time take this truss rod cover off make sure the truss rod is snugged up as tight as it can be snugged up i guess you'd say and when i say that i don't mean like as tight as it can go i'm talking about like you want to make sure it ain't loose you want to snug it up so that it's like it's not going to just vibrate loose or something like that if i don't find anything unusual there i'm not gonna show it to you but if i do find something unusual i will show you as always okay so i was i'm glad i took this truss rod cover off the uh nut is totally loose i can spin it with my fingers you probably can't see that but i ca yeah i can't get my finger in there and do it but i can spin it with my finger trust me it's really loose so that's never a good thing you know righty tighty in other words if you're looking at the end of the truss rod you turn it to your right in other words over the top to the right and um all right i'm just snugging it up and see i'm just doing it with two fingers here okay that's about as tight as i can get it with a couple of fingers and that's about as tight as it probably needs to be that's pretty tight it's you know i i gotta i guess i should say that i do feel like my fingers are pretty strong so you know i've gotten it pretty tight for two fingers snug but not crazy tight so that you're gonna break something so it's snugged up it's still got room to tighten it up some more if if it turned out to have a bigger underbow i've always said if you can see a relief in your neck generally you have too much you know ten thousands relief is pretty tiny it's the thickness of a human hair and i'm sorry it's the twice the thickness of a human hair so it's pretty tiny and you know to see that down the length there if you can see that you're you've got really good eyes i can see that believe it or not but uh i've been looking at this stuff for a very long time so when i saw this one and i saw the the relief i thought yeah it's probably got a little bit more than it needs because i can see it fairly well so anyway we tightened that back up we'll put the truss rod cover back on it and some people might say well then how did i level the frets if i didn't have that tight again we're talking the thickness of a human hair or just a little bit more than that and over the length of that that fret file doesn't care it's just not that terribly important the only time it really is important that you have the truss rod really tight is or or tightened up at least is when there is a significant under bow and that's a totally different ball game a totally different animal you're dealing with when you can look down it and see a really big under bow then you got bigger problems and you need to start working on that that's not what we have here this was just a very very very minor underbow and i'm going to put pencil lead down in here actually believe it or not the mechanical pencil transfers to this much better i don't know why but it does i've always thought the tren the mechanical pencil lead was actually harder but it seems to transfer to this plastic much better slots are getting too small even for that so here's the fine leaded pencil we'll go in there with that well the regal wreck seems to be working out real good i really should call it regal wreck two but uh i think we're in good shape i can see where someone has tried to re-glue this pickguard once i'm going to scrape all that old glue off and see if we can't make it work again and i honestly can't guarantee it but i think it'll work this is the old plastic you can tell that's really flammable you can smell it it's super super super flammable if you touch a match to that it'll just poof go up like like that and be gone it wouldn't hurt to wipe it down with something i'm gonna i decided to just play it safe because of the old type plastic and just use some denatured alcohol i'm pretty sure that won't create any problem and there is a little bit of creep and crud coming off of it so it's probably a good thing to wipe it down a little bit so i'm wiping it really good with that clean towel too the reason is i'm going to try the two-way tape to stick it down with that and i want it as clean as i can possibly get it line it up with the old shadow i think i'll get my close-up specs on for that light over here a little bit better i think that worked pretty good i think we covered the old shadow really well now the last little thing is where someone else had replaced this bridge they've left quite a bit of damage here i'm going to just try touching that up and making it look a little bit better and see what we can do about that because these marks are pretty much down to you know to bare wood i'm going to try this amber shellac it often matches these old finishes really well it virtually makes some of these just disappear i mean they just go away i'm not sure how many of these you can see and i'll probably end up knocking my varnish over and everything here trying to show you this but like there's little white specks here and if you get just a tiny bit of the varnish on there it makes most of them go away especially the ones that are through the finish if they're not through then it doesn't make them go away too much here's a pretty deep hole right here and i'm just actually just going to see if i can more or less fill that in that's a pretty deep hole the shellac is a pretty good filler the only thing i've got against shellac is it will turn milky white if you sweat on it so i typically don't use it for a finish but on touch-up like this it's not too bad i think it made it look better anything you can do to improve it where your eye just doesn't get drawn to a spot and i think that helped that a lot these spots around here on the sides i don't think this is going to do anything but it won't hurt to test it i guess doesn't really look like it's going to do much there i don't know what caused those colors if i can come up with anything that makes that look better i'll show you i don't know if it'll help or not but i'm going to try a little bit of the be good oil on this to see if it'll you know rejuvenate it a little bit it's it's it's almost like the finish is dried out and gotten messed up but yeah that doesn't look like that's going to do much either unfortunately the finish is pretty much flaked off in these places i'm not sure what that was i would say it was a strap a reaction to a strap that was in there or just a reaction to something some material in the case and it's probably some chemical reaction between whatever that chemical was in that other material and the finish doesn't really seem like it's going to help it much so i'm going to call that good enough it's a a huge huge huge improvement over the way it came in because i really would have called it a wreck or a dumpster diver guitar because it really was on the edge of a dumpster but it's pretty darn sound now so let's play it for you and see what it sounds like well my good friends i believe this regal rec 2 has met its match and it's up in pretty darn good shape in fact the action on it is just nice it's really nice it's probably never been that nice it plays like a dream it really does it's easy and easy easy to chord got a nice sound [Music] [Applause] here's a little song and so you can hear kind of what it sounds like we live in two different worlds deep [Music] that's why we're so far apart you made a world out of vowels that were broken and i built a world in my heart yes everyone here tried to warn me that you were playing again but i told them all we were meant for each other i thought our worlds were the same but we live in two different worlds dear that's why we're so far apart [Music] you built a world out of vows that were broken and i built a world in my heart [Applause] got a nice sounding guitar now it's back on the road again as willie would say thank you so much for watching please support us by clicking that thumbs up it does help a lot and if you're not yet subscribed please subscribe to the channel we're trying to get to that hundred thousand mark and we're gonna make it thanks for watching

Channel: Rosa String Works

Views: 54,103

Keywords: Guitar, acoustic, acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, violin, guitar repair, mandolin repair, fiddle repair, instrument, instrument repair, repair, fix, luthier, luthierie, luthiery, music, rosa string works, rsw, jerry rosa, rosa, bluegrass, woodworking, wood working, handmade, custom build, hand carved, setup, build, bridge, neck, headstock, brace, bracing, crack, fret, fretjob, nut, saddle, antler saddle, antler, inlay, rosewood, spruce, paduak, Gibson, Fender, Martin, Taylor, kay, tips, how to, how-to

Id: 1fMqPTokP3s

Length: 72min 49sec (4369 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021