Is This $25,000 Guitar Ruined?

i'm trying to scratch the finish too you know that's always the goal i should be going that way but i really can't so i'm just going to be using that much more [Music] [Music] welcome to triple guitars my name is chris behind the cameras matt as always hey i just noticed it's over all day here in the shop matt's got his uh yeah matt's got his overalls on yep what we have in store for you guys today is a bit of a murder mystery i have a guitar that i built for a client let's see we've got this uh from three years ago um and it's one of my favorite guitars i built brazilian rosewood back insides i believe it was he has adirondacks bruce top on it he's a scuba diver so we did this really cool um diving motif on here but he was having some issues with his truss rod just keeping it stable um i need to talk to him about proper humidification i think but parents talk to your children exactly vacation uh and spay new to your pets but um he called me kind of in a panic about a month ago um and told me that he broke his trust rod which as a guitar builder i'm like oh my god especially a guitar builder where i have fretboards with really fragile inlays on them which scares me even more so he said dude like i literally broke the tip off of the truss rod and sent me a photo of it uh before he sent me the guitar and this is it um but before i get into what that means i guess i need to back up for just a second and explain a little bit about the trust rod i think that the vast majority of people who watch this channel know what a trust rod is and how it works but i don't want to take that for granted so i want to show you guys an actual truss rod in fact the same truss rod that's in this guitar let me make sure this is gonna work yes so this is the same style truss rod sending guitarist is the um stu mac hot rod two-way adjustable truss rod with the four millimeter allen key on the end of it so it's inside the neck right around here and what you use a truss rod for is you can turn this this way you can tighten it and cause a back bow in the neck i don't know if that's coming through right yeah or you can loosen the truss rod and allow more relief in the neck there we go and so this is now sandwiched inside the neck in between the neck material and the fretboard as well so um the client like i said broke off not i wouldn't say by any fault of his um this this end broke off of the threaded part of the truss rod and you can see it's just a couple of tack welds that hold it on i have not heard of this happening with these truss rods and i've been using them for years so i'm not i think it just might have just been a defect on this particular one i'm not concerned about like these truss rods as a whole but so now i gotta fix this because this guitar is not playable typically if you have a bad trust rod the way that you would fix that is you gotta pull the neck off um and then you've gotta pull the fingerboard off which is a whole dang thing um so you have to steam that off so that we can get access to the truss rod pull it out put a new one in and put it back on and then repair all the finish and yes of course of course it's a sunbursted neck on this guitar so if i were needing to repair the finish or even damage the finish by doing the repair that i'd have to refinish the whole thing long story to say that what i need to do at this point pull the strings off pull the neck off um and get into it because i think i think i might be able to solve this uh in my brain it works but i might be able to solve this without me needing to replace the truss rod but i don't want to reveal my thoughts until we get in there and i see what it looks like but so what we're going to do is pull these strings off i'm going to heat up the fingerboard extension here using this nice lmi digital heater and pop that off because my necks are bolt on so i'll be able to take the two bolts out and pull it off so let me do that and let's see what uh what lies under the skin all right we got the strings off and i've got the lmi heater ready to go for those of you who don't know are not familiar with this uh lmi sells this and i've used it for years i have two of them actually one of them is for my side bender and then this one i got for just doing repair things i don't have the proper heat blanket for this this is their bridge removal one i believe it's not the one for this job uh because what we're doing is using it as a fingerboard extension heater um we're gonna put it over just this portion i'm gonna do like 200 degrees fahrenheit ish until golden brown until golden brown because there's always the concern here is this especially on a finished guitar especially with nitrocellulose finishes that i don't want to heat up the area so much that i possibly cause any blistering with a lacquer i also don't want to put too much heat in this general area because i do have my inlay here i also have my frets here i also have all the abalone inlay and the glued on binding so there's a lot of things in that area that can also be cause degradation to the glue joint because of the heat so this is like this is a kind of a crappy situation um so i'm just going to be very careful i'm going to check it often and then i'm going to use this little like a stumack this is a little stumack bridge removal tool and it's kind of cool because it's got felt on this side and it's got a slight angle on it and it's going to allow me to safely be able to put this underneath here and separate the two glue joints so that's what we're going to do a bit of an adventure of trying to not mess it up you could fit a greased bb in my hiney uh while i do this [Laughter] you couldn't pull floss from a butthole right that's right uh so we'll turn it on we'll put the old uh the thermocouple on here six hours later now we've been what matt probably 15 minutes yeah a little 15 minutes i'm at 193 degrees fahrenheit for some reason i'm just going to give it a feel oh the frets are hot but everything looks really good i'm not having any issues of delamination with any of my um my inlays or anything oh a little bit of the wax that's in there because i use use a little bit of wax to fill in some of the black lines so i need to reapply that but so i'm going to get this under here and see if i can get what i want yeah see how it's slowly going in because the the glue is gummy and that's what you want if you're feeling it and it's making cracking noises or uh like kind of like yeah like don't it's not ready yet and i'll probably only get about a quarter of the way there um before i gotta apply heat again because it's cooling off obviously as i'm doing this trying to scratch the finish too you know that's always the goal not always the end result we're getting close it's not it's not quite there i'm gonna just break the seal here and now on this side i'm going in the wrong direction i should be going that way but i really can't so i'm just going to be even that much more careful can you hear it don't particularly love the sound i'm trying to decide if it's the sound of glue coming undone or is there a sound of fibers of wood coming undone i think what i'll do is uh i'm gonna i'm gonna stop what i just did apply it just put it back on for some more time ain't nothing to about to do it so okay it's now probably been like 25 minutes since we originally started heating it up and it's significantly easier suddenly i have a lot of luck sometimes just running perpendicular to the grain direction um it kind of is the best of the best case scenario for you to not tear out anything oh man i'm trying to be careful here this is what's so tough about this if you ever needed to do this and you're new to guitar repair so much that this is just like knowing what you're feeling and if you've never done it before it's very much like everything you need to be emotionally in touch that's right okay so now we're broken through in one direction so i'm just trying to be very careful that i don't screw up anything else here i should probably go ahead and loosen the bolts on the neck here in a second too yeah being very careful i think we're ready to loosen the bolts this should help a little bit don't mind the beeping we uh have trumpet dehumidifier to run these to do these videos our humidity alarms going off which matt thinks is a stupid video idea to do about shopping beautification show shout out in the comment section if you want to do a video on shop humidification because i think matt's wrong i'm just saying it's it's very niche it is very neat well this channel is a little thing yeah like the broad audience of people who are interested in luther is so massive i'm gonna just oh it's cooking still ah there we go there it is but you don't want to rely just on pulling up like that because it can still cause some big issues but it's got me a little bit of a gap now that i can get this up underneath i think i might have torn a little bit of fibers but i think i've gotten away with as little as possible oh it's fine that'll buff out there it is it's so close there's a there's a fiber of wood holding it on i'm definitely gonna have a little bit of a tear i think i can just feel it there it goes yeah you can hear it yeah yeah a little bit of a oh yeah maybe even a lot of it a little bit of a chunk but we'll be able to get that fixed yes yes see look at all that now this wood got taken out in a spot where i have a giant spot cut out here right there where my truss rod access channel is so that actually wasn't even doing anything right there so i'll clean all this up when i go to put it all back on and make it look really nice and neat and make sure that we're not going to have any issues there but disregard the piece of top stuck on here um and see this can we get that good right matt i think that this is actually really good because what we have from what i can see i know sorry about the mess yeah that's what we have is just this was originally sticking out there but this is all really good thread you know look at all that thread it's it's fine yeah it looks like it got smushed a little bit as this was coming off i mean i bet you this will even just thread on there so i have lots of hope i'll mess with in a second but i have lots of hope that i can come up with a solution uh on fixing this um i just need to to think on it for a minute because my my most crazy idea is to fire up my welder but uh this is this is uncharted territory but it's a spot weld that failed right and uh i've got a welder i know how to spot weld yeah plus i'd make for a cool thumbnail yeah spot welding on the guitar but let me uh let me just take probably turn the camera off for a minute let me think on this uh and we'll report back with what i what i what i find i think okay um a little bit of a gorilla tactics here but i think we've got a game plan so far i'm a little i'm a little leery about it a couple things is this i've i've already started to come up with a solution but this is reverse threaded and originally i was gonna just thread it back on let's see yeah i was going to just thread it back on and tack weld it into place but then i got to thinking maybe i can just slide the uh slide the truss rod out so we've actually been over here with our vise hammering it out and i think it's working so i think we're gonna do that route instead i'm just gonna so i'm just gonna slide i'm gonna try to slide this truss rod out and then slide a new one back in we're gonna see if that'll work now mind you like when i glued the fretboard on like there's glue that's gotten down into that slot where the truss rod is so it's an adventure but we're gonna figure it out didn't really want to be so proud yeah you just gotta figure it out man so not only do we got to successfully get this one out but we got to get a fresh one in um and this has got like a quite a bit of a bend on it so i'm going to try to take that out now that we've committed to removing the stress rod i think we're in it to win it at this point so we're having to put a pair of vices on here because they keep popping open i'm having to put another set of uh um of pliers here and some and we're just gonna try to knock it out there's what is it those of you on the internet keep trying to think of it the the where you have a vice grip and the handle's got a slider on it this is a slide hammer that might be it i think that's actually what it's called but we're basically making one of those it's going [Music] oh god this truss rod has got such so many twists in it it's scaring me because it's bending uh it's wanting to bend the fingerboard there it goes coming out of the sleeve here i'm checking like as we were doing this originally i'm checking down here to make sure we're not damaging anything on the on the neck i've got it nice and tight in here thank god for stu max devices these aren't steel mic doesn't own these these are somebody else makes them but they're awesome vices and then i'm checking to make sure i'm not getting any splitting inside of here and we're not so so far so good fast forward to the end if you want to see it was a success oh now it's coming yeah exactly it's going really well now that's all so far so good i'm tearing these vices these vice grips up but all in the name of science [Music] there it is and as you can see this truss rod was way over torqued uh yeah i got to quit telling my clients they can do their own test ride adjustments that's on me i'm gonna be honest it's on me um so now we gotta insert the new truss rod i mean and i this is look how much pressure's on that i mean look how much torque is on this yeah and it's actually the wrong direction that torque is actually yeah that the way that this was sitting in here this is designed he was actually adding bow to the neck which i don't understand that um so we'll get this guitar set up now um i've got a drop-in replacement the like i said this is their the i think it's 14 and a half inch hot rod truss rod with the four millimeter um uh allen key on the end here's one thing i was showing matt too is look how good it's braised on and it's really really solid on this one yeah so i think we're gonna be fine uh as far as that was a one-off deal there so um i think we could just hammer it in yeah yeah all right so i've got some uh some glide coat that i'm spraying on here and just uh the ball stick glyco table and tool surface lubricant i use this stuff all around the shop all the time but maybe just uh maybe a different reason for it this time um the friction alone is enough to hold this thing in place once it's in there so i'm not worried about that but uh [Laughter] wow okay and he sticks the landing that was and that's how you do it folks i don't know if you can tell how surprised chris said that'll be ten thousand dollars no um okay we've replaced the truss rod and they're that easy so wrench away at home they're super easy to repair i don't know so that was uh surprisingly easy uh slight background yeah i'm sorry ender no no yeah so you saw you saw my super my genuine surprise at how easy that went back in there that uh some old-time repair guys who've been doing this for years probably are like yeah it's that easy i've uh i've never in all my years of doing repair work had to do a trustworthy placement but that technique worked really really well also i do want to note that it would have been a whole other animal had the access hole probably had it been from up here then you would have needed to uh to replace the fretboard pull the fretboard off and put it back on again so that is a big reason that that saved us i think that it came out from the bottom nice and clean so um while we were off camera i went ahead and cleaned all this up and got it looking really good so now we can't have any issues with cracking or anything like that there's a couple little spots here where there's still some glue showing and slight fiber tearing but i'm comfortable with it uh this is cleaned off so put some glue on it and we'll put it back on we've real time maybe including heating it up maybe we've been here for an hour it's not even lunch time yet yeah so brad this is best case scenario buddy your guitar is going to survive it's going to make it yeah so a little music glue on here um i'm gonna we've got a clamping call here so yeah i mean this is this is easy peasy we're just gonna we're just gonna get this thing ready to go all right so we got a little bit of this uh like the lmi instrument glue on here just got it nice and set in place not enough that we're going to get a bunch of squeeze out because we don't want that we're going to ease this bad boy back where we want it stand it up get my screws ready i just think that this video was really kind of about the adventure more than anything maybe the real treasure yeah what's the principle yeah there wasn't necessarily a whole lot of lessons here i think maybe the lesson is you know i'll try to think outside the box and uh problem solving is is never ending in guitar building and uh i i'm a happy customer even though i'm not the customer so yeah all i got to do is glue this on i'm going to touch up a little bit of the the the wax filling inside some of these binders the inlays and then we'll do a proper setup on this guitar and get it back to brad so he can get back to gigging with it and uh i hope you guys enjoyed the episode don't forget to make sure you check out our website drewfookguitars.com and driftwoodguitars.com tonewood will take you to a special section on our website where we're selling all kinds of tone woods brazilian rosewood bridge blanks the works uh and a couple of uh little tools on there too so check that out and purchase away and we thank you all for watching i hope you guys subscribe and we'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Driftwood Guitars

Views: 159,964

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Id: BXDTbt-JWlI

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022