50's Hofner Action Issues

yeah but is Stewart Stacy with Astrid means one of us still have to play bass Maia gang got an old Hoffner guitar here don't know the exact year but I think it's mid 50s and I don't know the exact model either like a 455 457 some guitar geek will know and it is in really nice shape some lovely vintage mother of toilet seat this thing has no play where I think it's remained virtually untouched throughout its entire history there's some light crackle on the lacquer on the back here but no belt buckle where there's a gorgeous sunburst ii really like this color there's one little issue here the celluloid binding is pulled away from the body up to the mid point here on the upper bout the treble side usually these things set yeah yeah there it is there's it's missing the support rod for the pickguard there's a hole on the heel which I assumed previously housed a strap button the vintage tuners no loss of finish on the neck so what's the catch the action is about twelve sixty fourths which is about 187 thousandths which is about four point seven millimeters above the twelfth fret that's real high so this is one of those interesting times to be a guitar repair guy when it comes to these 50s hoppers because of their association with the Beatles people assume they're worth a lot more than they really are the electric models yes there's some value there if it was something that George played for a time in 1960 I mean there's a certain kind of guy he wants to dress up put on the leather trousers pretend he's playing the Kaiser Keller those are desirable the 501 violin bass of course definitely everyone knows that one it's like ten twelve fifteen thousand dollars depending on the condition it could be made the same day as this one worth thirty times as much but these utilitarian ones there's no cutaway there's no pickup in this case there isn't even a truss rod these guitars just don't sell for all that much and I think in this case a lot of this guitars value is tied to just how clean it is it's visual appeal it's a really beautiful object really untouched and it's completely unplayable now a lot of things I can do to make it play well but it would cost more and repair work than it would to buy it so the the the effort outstrips the market value and all those things that need doing each of those bring along the possibility of damage at every step along the way in what is otherwise a really clean guitar it wouldn't be original at the end of the day someone comes along he's gonna say wow that's been changed that's not the way it was well what's going on here with that so there's this really crazy balancing act you have to do and this is different from that harmony we're working on right now or some of those other guitars I've made videos about with a huge amount of work doesn't make sense I get the comment all the time and like is it worth it and the answer is no of course it's not unless you're trying to learn how to fix guitars I'm not making those videos to show you what should be done in every case but I'm sharing what it takes to learn about instrument repair and in reality if someone brings me a $500 guitar and asked me to do $1,100 for it to work on it I need to look at that person really really carefully because they can be out to lunch the perception can be so far off that their expectations of what is possible are - these are at some point no longer in these to land there an object of desire there fetishized and you're dealing with some weird psychology there so learning how to read customers and who to say no to is just as important as the repair sometimes the neck on this is warped upwards just like in that harmony guitar we've been working on and the relief is more than 25 thousandths in the center of the board half a millimeter it's quite bowed people ask if that can be heat bent back into straightness and yes that is possible but to do that on this one I would have to very carefully remove these pearloid inlays save them and then reinstall them afterwards because you can't get heat near this stuff it will melt and possibly just burst right into flame like the ignition point on celluloid is that low just removing them without damage isn't always the easiest thing either right and you can imagine your dismay if you mess one of these things up because trying to find a replacement is going to be really really tough nothing is going to look right because it's aged in its own particular way so if you're gonna go that far it's probably worth just taking the whole fingerboard off and installing a truss rod while you're at it and then there's a neck angle like neck reset maybe if you really love this guitar and you've been playing it for years and it was an integral part of your musical identity but again that would cost just about as much as this thing's worth right now it's current market value and you might be better off just leaving this thing as is and finding a different guitar to play so I think the goal is to take this thing from unplayable to playable and just you know what does that mean what's a good action for this guitar something to consider a good action today is probably far lower than what this guitar had when it left the factory so what seems simple like just lower the action that can be the first domino in a really really long chain so if we lower the action we might then discover that the frets are level the fact that's currently being obscured by the high set up so sometimes it pays to check out the whole board in advance with a fret rocker just give yourself a jump start on the headache you know because you're not just going to be lowering the action you're also going to be doing fret work now let's say we want to reduce the action to 660 fourths mmm two point four millimeters ish which could be reasonable I mean these things are I mean they're really designed for chunking of jazz chords okay that's half the current action so to lower it we would have to remove the equivalent of the entire action height from the height of the bridge it's almost five millimeters again you know 1260 fourths that's a lot I think we're lucky in this case because Hoffner put on a full sized bridge is good and tall and we can take it down a little without making it look too foolish this calls into question whether it's okay to change a bridge like this I like to think of arch top bridges sort of like tires on a car they play an important role in handling and comfort and performance but the are subject to wear and if at some point they need changing or replacing I don't think it makes a huge impact I don't think we have to be too guilty about it have a look at the way the ends of the bridge are suspended above the soundboard the top is sunk a bit from string tension and I think the bridge went along with that and warped with it so if I fit this carefully to the top we can solve a two millimeter or two right there we can also take off a sliver from both the top and bottom of the two halves of the bridge if this was a d'angelico guitar I might go a completely different route and make a whole new saddle top for it put this one in the case to preserve it just as it is in the event that someone down the line wanted to do the full deal and get a neck reset but remaking bridge parts is not too difficult and again we're balancing collector mentality with the need to make something play at a reasonable price just a couple more things before I take the strings off here I want to check the string length and see whether the bridge is in approximately the right place so I've got 320 millimeters to the centre of the 12th fret we expect about 640 one and a half 642 maybe and yeah we're about three millimeters short the treble side same on the base so this bridge is you know it's actually got to move towards the tailpiece some that brings up the next question just looking at this old pick guard here I mentioned that it was missing the support rot that runs to the side of the body and so it's kind of free-floating at the moment and I think at the very least we should probably put a little piece of rigid foam under there to provide more support make it less likely to flop and I'd actually worried about hitting this thing in the wrong way and maybe cracking something but the way it's held to the guitar it's actually two little nails or like wire Brad's there's one that goes up into the fingerboard extension and this guy here which actually is nailed right into the base of the bridge it runs through a little plastic sleeve here on the underside of the pick guard and the head of the nail is actually under there it's not on this side so just looking at this thing if I want to move the bridge back to get proper intonation I think we're going to run out of room I don't think that nail will be long enough so I'll have to come up with some sort of alternate system for holding it in place thinking maybe I'll bore all the way through the bridge and then I can put in a long slender screw to just run it into a small block that I can superglue to the bottom side of the pick guard here that'll make it easier like it'll be accessible from this side so it won't be such a nail-biter when it comes time to take this thing apart if the bridge ever needs to get moved again for instance because everything here is you know so fragile it's kind of old and crispy I don't want to break this so I'd be really careful when I take it apart easier said than done [Music] Wow that's really tight the ball end is stuck right in the end of the trapeze and you know as soon as I push hard enough it's gonna go straight into the finish Wow jeepers these things are so snug in the holes makes you wonder whether the dimensions of the ball ends on strings have changed over the years okay all right so stuffing there on the surface underneath the bridge might be exposed when we move it back can't really be helped though well just sort of what happens with old guitars taping some sandpaper in place here over the location of the bridge they can start sanding it then put some pencil marks on the bottom of the bridge so I know how far I've come and where my contact is ideally we're gonna have full contact all the way along the bottom of the bridge there see that I'm only removing some from the inner portion here is the top is sunk in that area now I'm gonna go ahead and take off more down here than I normally would because you know the aim is to lower the saddle right so the bottom of the bridge is curved it's got a radius on it so I'm using a marking gauge to give myself a line to cut to okay so cut that plane down this is sort of a complimentary curve in here it's about a 20 inch radius curve on both the top and bottom parts and I managed to keep that pretty consistent but of course you can see that the screws now are a little bit too long we're gonna have to lose about two millimeters of those screws i sanded down the bottom until it was basically flush with the screws on the inside so if we take off two millimeters will have enough adjustment to move up a little bit I don't imagine we'll need it but we will be able to bottom this out and get to about the right height for the bridge the single greatest use for a dremel tool abrasive cut-off wheels is it's real killer app got to remove the burn just slightly round over the tops of these so we can get the thumb wheels back on you know with the string sticking in the tail piece like that I'm kinda tempted to drill these out a little bit wider but the holes are so close to the top edge that I don't think I should risk it so I'm just going to try and ebert the top they're kind of rough on the top use a little handheld countersink here I couldn't leave him like that so I picked up the Dremel again with a little ball and mill and just lightly relieved them enough to make the strings fine in one of the inlays is lifting on the corner here and your thumb would definitely catch it at some point and rip it up so what I'm going to do is wax off around it put a capo on to clamp it down and then get some superglue under there a little slip of one here at the end helps to localize the pressure of the clamp and measured the fret height here in a number of places and was very pleasantly surprised because not only are these things virtually unplayed they're very tall from the factory these are 50 thousandths of an inch tall which is that's great because as you'll remember there was going to be some spot leveling to do anyway but in this case I could also just level the whole thing take maybe ten thousandths of an inch off end up with a perfectly acceptable fret height of forty thousands no one's going to complain about that and at the same time dress out quite a lot of that extra relief we've got going on here and it won't be perfect but it would be a lot better than it is now so that's what I'm gonna do gotta remember to protect the zero fret in this case the nut came out by its own it's was very loose in there but I don't want to level that down too far I want to give myself some room to play in case I need to shift the nut height a bit you'll ask why I'm not using the neck tube for this and in this case I checked the measurement before and after how much it moved and don't think it's necessary it takes a long time to set that thing up so it close to one hundred and ten thousands wide by fifty thousand stall these are pretty much like modern jumbo frets which you don't really expect to find in a guitar from the 50s but I guess they were doing that it's time to deal with this loose binding situation now the traditional way to stick this stuff down is to use a cement that physically melts the surface of the plastic and welds it right into the wood duco cement is one of the brands sometimes people make their own by dissolving scraps of binding in acetone that works great too for building a new guitar it smells awful I'm gonna do something else that's completely different that will have a few people screaming at their monitor the problem is on a guitar like this that has a really nice pristine nitro lacquer surface so any little goober that squeezes out can just melt that surface and mess it up completely so you have to work ridiculously clean because you don't want to turn a one-hour job into three weeks of waiting for lacquer touch-ups to dry there goes all the profit the other thing is I've seen this in a number of old repairs classic is where it starts to pull away from the tight part of the waste here for some reason Reed plasticizing the old binding seems to really speed up the deterioration process I've seen guitars that were reglued like that I know we're 10 or 12 years previous you look at it and most of the binding is just fine but the spots that we're stuck down again have turned into cheese so I kind of want to avoid that if I can so I'm going to use fish glue and you can hear them now that stuff won't stick to plastic and you're right on smooth plastic it won't but you got to remember this was melted into the porous surface of the binding channel and it took an imprint of that so the inside here isn't smooth at all it's really rough it's like 120 grit sandpaper so the fish glue doesn't have to make a molecular adhesion to it but it does create a really good physical bond um there's a well-respected manufacturer hustin Dalton who them for a fact that they put their ivory binding on using regular old tight bond glue they rough it up with a sanding block stick it right on no problems I've worked on some of their guitars that are 12 15 years old stuck on there just fine the fish glue also cleans up really easily just lightly dampen rag and some rubbing and I know it won't be the strongest bond but this area isn't under a whole lot of stress and I think it's just going to be fine fish glue has also been used in metal inlay work for a long time Italian cabinetry and that sort of thing where they put ornate gold or silver so it's got a long history don't want to leave that tape on there too long mm three hours I'll take it off just checking things out here for the attachment system this is a p90 pickups crew it's very long and very thin I think that'll do well yeah that's will give us enough room so I've got to bore out the hole here okay that goes through nice and cleanly now I want to replace this little piece of plastic with a more substantial block of wood something that I can run that screw into and I think I'll also put a piece of this very thin surgical tubing on there as well to act kind of as a spring and also protect the surface of the plastic and you know just make a look a little more classy it's just gonna be a process of slowly and carefully paring it away okay got the outside strings on here I'm just going to plot out the spacing and I'm also marking where I'm going to drill a hole for the support block for the screw here if mark the bridge location for proper intonation of the outside strings and I've got two little pieces of double stick tape very thin very sticky stuff on the underside of the feet and now that's not gonna go anywhere and it's locked in place basically just stringing it up I noticed that we're missing one of the tuner bushings and of course the first thing I did was go back to the previous videos I filmed yesterday to make sure this thing isn't on the floor somewhere and though this is how it came in so yeah I've got nothing in my stash here that comes close and looking at it the clearance between the post and the hole is so small I don't think you could fit a regular bushing down there I'm wondering whether these things are actually glued on in top or something this one actually has a little split in the side here the zero fret height for the lower strings started off a little bit high and since we did the fret dressing has become much too high so I've got a dress that down and wreak roun it so I've got the setup all done here the frets turned out pretty nice well here's a shot of the bridge and the saddle setup and this is about as low as I would want to go on an arch top guitar if you take the strings too low if he gets beneath maybe 19 20 millimeters from the top of the soundboard 3/4 of an inch you start to lose a certain quality of the arch top sound it becomes something different more akin to a maca fairy style guitar which isn't bad but it's not what we're looking for and for practical purposes you also need a certain amount of downward dentin from a tail piece otherwise it starts to get quiet and lose focus but we got away with it this time sounds pretty good alright so the action we ended up with is about five and a half sixty fourths maybe eighty five thousands two point one millimeters on the base side and just a hair lower on the trouble which I think is pretty good given what we started with [Music]

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Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020