Guitar Repair: Lifting Bridge 65 Epiphone Texan

welcome back everybody my name is dave hayes and this is life post stroke uh what we're going to talk about today is a epiphone texan uh it is an all solid wood guitar meaning it has a sitka spruce top with solid mahogany back in size it's got a mahogany neck on it it's just a nice guitar it's a nice old guitar and it has that vintage epiphone slash gibson sound because remember the f phones the good ones well actually all of them they didn't make real cheap ones back then but both apophone and gibson were made in the same plant so the gibson and the upper phones were all made in kalamazoo michigan and when they made them in michigan they were making them out of the exact same woods they were being made by the same luther luthiers which is a guitar maker and pretty much everything was exactly the same the old f phones are basically a gibson when we come back i'm going to bring you guys along for the ride with me when we go to re-glue the bridge down on this guitar because it started pulling off as soon as we come back we're going to go ahead and start this project [Music] all i was going to do is strip the bridge of all what we were going to take the the nut out we were going to take all the external bolts off this has the old fashioned adjustable bridge we're going to take all that out so we can go ahead and get start and i'm going to show you why that is uh basically they glued on top of the finish instead of cutting the finish away to bare wood and then gluing the bridge on they glued it right over top of the freaking finish and that's how most the big guitar manufacturers did it back then so let's go ahead and get a closer look at this and i'll show you all what we're doing with this and where we're at right now so basically what we did was we scored around the bridge so that when we chip this finish off of here and get it back to bare wood again it doesn't chip away into the finish and i know it's going to it is going to inevitably chip away some of this finish i know there's no getting around that but to eliminate most of it we scored around it if you look at the bottom of the grid it's got two bolts that go through the top of the guitar and there's little nuts and washers that holds the brick in place exactly those two bolts and a little i don't even think the glue was holding because once i loosened up the bolts to these the nuts to these the whole i could feel the whole bridge move that's what was holding this bridge on so like i said i took the little nuts off we put everything into a little plastic bag so we don't lose anything i also removed the adjustable nut that goes in here and that nut is right there that nut is made out of uh it's just rosewood it's a rosewood nut i'd love to be able to fill that and have it re-cut and put a bone nut in there but you know what i'm just happy that we're gonna get this fixed even though the bridge was lifted on this and everything the strings were only i mean the strings were very low yeah it wasn't like district it wasn't like this guitar was hard to play or it was very you know uncomfortable but what we got to concentrate on right now is scraping off this finish and i'm not going to have you guys watch what we do but i wanted to bring you guys along for the ride with us while we get this guitar prepared and re-glued and get my bridge re-glued back on there and um i figured we'd go ahead and record it so next time you see us we'll have this scraped all the finish off of here and ready to move [Music] so basically what we did was we scored around the bridge we had the bridge we dropped it down into its pre-drilled holes where them little bolts were sticking down to the bottom of the bridge and i just took a very very sharp knife and scored around the bridge so we could cut through the finish because here's the reason why the old grid lifted to begin with was they glued that bridge on top of the finish that's there which is something you don't do that's a big no no no so what we're doing is scraping away the finish now what i'll do is when i glue this up i'll glue it up now put them bolts back on and tighten them up to pull that bridge down then i'll put my clamps on it so this should be a really nice glue up job that's exactly how you do it now [Music] it took us a long time to find i have probably 20 30 chisels and do you think i could find a single chisel yeah we found one one single chisel all right we'll bring you back when we get a little further on down the road with this job okay ready okay we have everything sanded chipped away i i stand at the back of the bridge noah sanded the guitar top um it actually went very well we have a couple very small necks in it but you know what they're battle scars and uh that just goes to show that when you have an old guitar things happen uh and this is only the second time i've ever replaced the bridge so uh what we're gonna do is we are going to take our wood glue and we're using the same glue that we used on the on his guitar on his gibson that we fixed and we're gonna use it on that [Music] do [Music] and the nice thing about working with uh like an elmer's or yeah it doesn't set you have a lot of time to work with it so that was being very very cautious about how he uh you know puts the glue on last time we were like rushing around we were so scared it was gonna dry on us this time we're taking our time uh we're using a little brush to brush it around to make sure it's nice and even the whole way around um and this time for us less is better so that looks good now okay let them see how you have that covered on both sides [Music] so [Music] do [Music] okay here we are day two and um it's still it has to set well it's actually you could probably pull the clamps off of it i pulled the center clamp off of it but we're leaving the end clamps on yet until about six o'clock tonight then we're going to go ahead and pull the last two clamps off of it but i wanted to show you where we're at on this right now while i have all the strings off and i have everything stripped off here i took a razor blade [Music] and i scraped the fretboard um and when i say scrape you just hold it flat and you just scrape it back and forth basically taking off the old oil kind of gunk uh you know the the stuff from your fingers stuff like that i'll never get out the big divots and i wouldn't want to uh even though i said you know no uh they need to stay there because that reminds us of who used to play this guitar and a history with it you know which is a big family history thing so we left that in but the inlays really cleaned up nicely uh and then what i did was i took paint pen uh you know then once you shake up with the paint inside and i went around and dabbed a couple of spots on the top up here on the peghead because i kind of wanted to fill some of the deep scratches and the next it's got a it's got some pretty big nicks up here but again it's not going to look new it's not going to look you know pristine and i don't want it to look pristine i want it to look like this but as soon as this gets done drying tonight we're going to let it go until tomorrow to give it you know even another night for it to dry and then we will go ahead and put strings on and one thing i did do is i took this cover off and this is the adjustment for the neck i took that cover off and i have no tools whatsoever that will fit the nut on the end of that and what i wanted to do is i just wanted to check that to see if it was loose and if i could takes a little bit of tension back because this is straight as an arrow there's no you know anything like that so it could actually have a little bit of back pressure on it again before you adjust that take all the tension off the strings you know then and and don't ever go more than a quarter of a turn at a time string it back up get the tension check everything you know and go from there so all right i will bring you back whenever the glue on the fretboard is dried and um we'll go from there okay now i is putting the [Music] now it's putting the bridge back in [Music] see this is a two-piece bridge on this guitar and i hate these but you know and i was talking to know about you know i want to replace it noah is more for the historical value and keeping it original and i get it i mean it came with a rosewood bridge and gibson didn't change that until the 70s so you know this is what this guitar sounded like we want to try to keep it sounding like an old gibson listening to gibson um [Music] gibson yeah yep so noah has a 1964 gibson classical guitar and it was made in the same factories as kalamazoo michigan and um maybe even by the same person nobody knows now he took that all the way down this is an adjustable bridge i hate this that's why i want to get rid of it not get rid of the tarp at this i don't like adjustable bridges because you don't get the music flat on the guitar anymore if you raise that bridge up you have an airspace between this it's tight but i can loosen it a little bit no just take it down till it touches and then you're good that's it yeah it is if it's snug that's good you don't have to i want to make sure i want to make sure that bridge sitting on top of the it's now like almost it's about take it down it down and when it when it when it's when it stops screwing it's tight there you go yep tight is tight when it stops screwing it is at the bottom that's where i want plus remember we want to try to gain as much room as we can get we may have to take it back up hopefully you know i think the neck has enough of a rise in it because this could probably use a neck reset but we're not going to reset the neck we're not doing that i don't have the money number one i wish i did if i did i would have this thing set up like brand new again but i don't um and i'm happy with it even before we did the bridge with the bridge ripped out and sticking up in the air which put string height on it it sounded good it played great i ran a drill bit down through these holes because they had some glue they had some glue in there looks like a very well cared for old guitar yeah so if i can zoom in on the neck it looks like there's somebody to pair with yeah as you guys can see the neck looks really really nice now notice those diamond inlays just pop so you'll see when we get to start i'll have a nice straight on shot and i'll let you guys see it but while we're here and i have this zoomed in [Music] we'll show that tomorrow too the cowboy cord um i wanted to give you guys a good look at the uh the bridge job no i did outstanding because he did all the cutting and scraping i have no control over my right hand anymore um yes it's got some battle scars you know i don't care uh you you will get that when you reset a network yeah i'm not a professional this is only the listen to me reset an act you'll get that when you replace the bridge i would this is only what our second guitar ever putting a bridge back on so i think we did pretty damn good this had this had absolutely no tear out so there's a very very thin layer of glue in there which is what you want now of course when we did this we put you guys saw you glued on both pieces 100 coverage uh but what you don't want is just gobs of glue and then when you put it on it just it when you squeeze it down it's just glue everywhere it squeezed out it bubbled out the whole way around especially when we tighten down the clamps because this top's got a little bit of a bow in the top and that's just from years yeah and when we put the clamps on just the outside clamps it hit this first and it just put nice even pressure the whole way across so it actually turned out pretty good for us i didn't even need that third clamp we used it but i didn't need it and no blue one yes no glue went into the screw holes that adjust this up and down okay we have the bridge on it we strung it up so far everything's holding we did let it sit overnight an extra 12 14 hours you don't have to guys just so you know when the glue is dry it's dry but we were just kind of freaked out but the bridge is holding nicely the action on the guitar is actually very low we might have to raise the bridge [Music] kathy [Music] do [Music] okay hey guys um we are at the end of the video and as you can see from the previous video i showed you some close-ups of it and it has been what no about how long two days it's been about two days now and everything's holding up great no separation and the guitar sounds phenomenal i would have never guessed that this guitar would it's completely changed the sound of the guitar you guys probably won't notice it because our microphones do not pick up the subtle nuances that a guitar puts out but we can hear it well we recorded it when the bridge was broken and it was a little bit muffled but you can really hear it now hopefully i'll try i will try to look for the old recordings and i'll put some in here so we can do a side by side but we're going to go ahead and let noah play it let you guys hear what it sounds like [Music] you [Music] so [Music] let me put on my pick here real quick and while i'm at it you just keep an eye on the video okay i'm going to go ahead and use the pic that we purchased this one to be looking at you yeah both of them are looking at me but you know it just gives different angles so i'm going to go ahead and use this pick that we purchased um for people that have handicaps and it's nice i wish the pick was thinner okay and i'm just going to play straight chords i'm not going to try to do any picking or anything because it's i'm still having to i'm still trying to get used to it [Music] so [Music] man i can't believe how this sounds [Music] okay we're going to play a g c d a minor seven e a minor seventh maybe some bar chords [Music] i can't believe how low these strings are [Music] do [Music] so there you guys have it if you have an issue with your bridge coming off i recommend watching a lot of videos on youtube and just reading some books do your own research because you can do it yes you're going to need some specialty tools we needed to get some clamps in a big way right yeah the clamps were the hardest things to find because you do need special clamps for this the only thing i can tell you is take your time we were lucky the bridge came off for us very easily the only thing that was holding it on were these two pins actually and a little couple spots of glue but if your bridge is being held on by like a lot more glue than ours is get a real thin putty knife heat that putty knife up put it in there and try to melt the glue out and there you go try not to cut the wood yes make sure you sand smooth or scrape smooth both the bridge and the base of the guitar and i would put the bridge back on the guitar trace around it with a razor and take off any finish that's going to impede the bridge from sitting flat on the wood and then be sparingly on the glue yes you can put a whole bunch of glue on it but you want to make sure you squeeze out almost all of it just so it has a nice smooth coating of glue and then wipe up your excess yeah i just don't do what we did the first time oh my god we went way overboard with the glue the first time but we learned from our mistakes the last thing yeah go ahead and get it the last thing i want to show you is the string height on this between the 12th fret top of the fret and the e string the low e maybe i could fit two dimes in there this guitar has never been this low since i've used it and it's just it's and the the sound is just phenomenally loud coming from this guitar with that being said i'm going to close this video out by letting noah show you the other guitar that we fixed and of course this one here is the gibson and this is a 1964 1964 one year newer than my guitar but this is not an f phone this is a gibson classical 1964. so we're going to close this out with him playing it uh if you like the video you know think about hitting that like button if you're new to the channel think about subscribing with that said we'll see you all on the next one [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Life Post Stroke

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Keywords: yt:quality=high, glockman4519, David Hayes, people, blogs, vlogs, tech, Life Post Stroke, medical, disabilities, handycaps, hobies, Black Mountain Picks, Epiphone ft79n Texan, guitars, Hayes Tech, Solid wood, solid top, Epiphone, dreadnott, guitar tech, first strums, handy-cap, Hayes Tech and Rom Reviews, Semichrome Polish, repair, bridge repair, Luthery

Id: O6osGgQlVFA

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022