Just a work-a-day luthier

well hey gang let's get through a couple of smaller jobs today i'm going to start off with this instrument here this is a custom or handmade guitar i'm told it was built by an amy apparently worked with george ferlinetto over at f bases 20 or 25 years ago so he was a local i don't know where he is or haven't seen anything from him before this is in for a setup but to be honest i'm going to spend a lot of time cleaning it because it's really filthy the owner has woodworking experience and he did a repair on the broken headstock here using epoxy but he'd like me to see if i can hide his tracks a little bit with some finish touch up you guys know i try and stay away from little finish touch-ups unless it's part of a much bigger repair um people will call me up and they'll say i've got a scratch on my les paul and i'm like yup that'll happen unless you're going to treat it like a classical player at least some of them keep it in the case never ever put it on a stand don't wear a belt buckle don't have a zipper on your hoodie keep your forearm and a sleeve every time you play it it's gonna get dinged it's gonna wear it's that's normal scratches are normal the problem is the people who can't accept a little scratch on their guitar they're the ones you know you'll spend hours agonizing over it trying to make it look decent and the other ones well i can still see it there it's like yes yes there's no way for us to turn back time to a period before you damaged your guitar so it's really hard to get paid enough to make it worthwhile in a lot of cases this time this is minor enough i've already got some paint mixed up for another job that should be close so you know we'll do that apparently it has not been played very much in those intervening 20 years and i believe it those are probably the original strings and that is just filthy um i want to take the bar off but i can't because it keeps running into the top here no i'm gonna have to loosen the springs on the inside before i try and take that off better plug it in to make sure it creates sound [Music] let's have a quick look inside here oh yeah scrubbing through the worst of it with some naphtha even got a toothbrush out to help in the endeavor see if we can make things shine i actually had to use fine polishing compound to cut through the coating that was on the top surface there it was really it was a film of grease or something see the before and the after after cleaning and scuff sanding the area that needs to be repaired i did some light pour filling over the bare surface of the wood which is walnut and also along the line of the crack using some thin super glue yeah don't glue the headstock cover to the guitar yeah that's um that's what you want to see right that truss rod nut is well and truly and probably forever ensconced in that nice bath of super hard epoxy you know the neck is going to be what the neck is going to be set it up as good as it can be set up but didn't bargain on that no i'm not laughing at the person who did the work you know it's unfortunate but if you can't laugh when you're in a guitar shop you will not make it very long as a repair person i'm going to thin down some lacquer to spray on this the actual color of the guitar is a sort of mysterious brownish black but it's also got something that looks like a very very fine gold flake in it too i'm not going to be able to match it perfectly but i've got a brownish black that will be pretty good and it'll work for this situation got the airbrush out going to spray on two coats of color and two coats of clear okay up next we have a tenor banjo from the premier company some indeterminate age 30s 40s 50s who knows it's got a skin head the pots a little bit deformed at this point and you can see that the head has been pulled down farther on the neck side of the body than on the tail that can be difficult to correct at this stage single dowel tension rod okay checking the action here at the 12th fret some people measure at the body i always just do the 12th fret even missing one of its four strings is just around 10 60 fourths i'd much prefer to see six and the bridge is virtually non-existent new ones they usually have a 5 8 inch bridge some of the old ones half inches typical this guy here is just over a quarter of an inch so nothing there we're going to have to tilt the neck back to lower the action and hopefully make a standard bridge work looking at the square dowel here it's got a simple screw at the tail end we might be able to snug that up enough to bring the walls of the pot together a bit and bring back some of that neck angle on the next side you can see there's a little bracket here with a screw that goes through it that bears against a metal plate on top of the dowel and it also has these diagonal slots that engage with a pin that goes through it now the assumption when you see this is that it's going to act like a neck tilt adjuster you screw it in it's just going to raise the neck up and it's mortise or something in this case it's really nothing more than a wedge just holding tension to keep the dowel and the pot together if you try and screw it in too tight you're just going to end up stripping out the threads there are other old banjos like the it's one brand i've worked on it has something similar but it's on the far end of the stick it's a little l bracket screwed to the pot and the screw that goes through there acts like a lever pushing the rod up and down so we're just going to try and make this play acceptably and again i'm not a banjo expert people sometimes ask to see banjos in the comments but you have to realize i don't live in an area with a big thriving banjo culture this isn't louisville so i don't see all that many master tones around here usually there's someone's third or fourth instrument something inexpensive they've picked up to a little bit of flavor to the repertoire so i'm just going to do my best on this one get the tail piece removed here and it's held in place using one of these tensioning nuts i have to remove that before i can access the one that holds on the rod if you get involved with banjo repair there's an awful lot of this just hours of turning little nuts and screws and see how much that's deformed over the years we'll loosen this off it makes things a little bit more loose ah you can see that there is a step that's milled into the end of the neck here to accept the hoop and the bead around the end of the the head here now in this case it was up flush against that bead it can't go any higher so unless we cut the channel a little bit deeper or reposition this head so that that bead is up higher and again on this side of the pot the hoop was pulled down tighter it's lower here you know in a newer banjo we might get away with it but i you know the idea of trying to reposition this head um given its age i don't know if we would get away with it it's pretty old with everything undone i was still struggling to remove the neck from the pot it was very confusing wow that's frustrating [Music] i bet you the threaded rod there at the end has bent over the years due to pressure on it or the pot itself is warped so much that it has dug into the side of the hole the hole was not very much bigger than the rod obviously and i might have to pound it out which is something that strikes fear in my heart maybe a wedge how can it be this tight i guess there was no way around it at some point today i was going to have to be excavating around a captured screw be it banjo or truss rod i decided to carefully drill it out using a plug cutter the hoop was just too low i realized i had to do it so i loosened all the tension brackets and tapped away at it it came up just fine actually there was a little step left over from where they milled the end of the neck so i decided to carefully pare that down so that it would be flush with the top of the dowel stick there that would give us a little bit more clearance and i could raise the neck up another oh sixteenth or three thirty seconds of an inch i made a plug for the previous screw hole and glued that in and paired it flush and drilled a new hole slightly higher up the body so i reinstalled the neck in its new higher position there and as i was putting on that wedge bracket i realized the screw had to go in further but it was being prevented because it was in fact very badly stripped out i had one that would work but it was much too long so i knew i would have to shorten it and similarly the bracket screw on the end that holds on the tail piece the nut just wouldn't pass through that bent portion so out came the dremel [Music] the front ends were protruding and pretty sharp so i cleaned those up and the top surface of the frets had been filed but never smoothed down so you know i cleaned those up as well put tape on the board but i realized that some of the paint was going to come off i could live with that because as i was cleaning it so did the sharpie that had been used to touch up the play wear i dyed everything with black india ink which is much nicer it's a better looking color i've dealt with this one before this is one of the worst tail piece designs of all time uh it's listed as patent pending it's one patent that never should have been granted [Music] despite the play wear on this instrument these nut slots are way high with everything snugged up and the neck raised to its highest possible elevation it's standing proud of the surface of the head by about an eighth of an inch here still working with the old bridge this low one we're nowhere near good we're still above eight and a half sixty fourths and uh it's very unfocused sounding there just isn't enough downward pressure on this bridge it's very discouraging um this pot has deformed over time it's folded in on itself so the top rim is moved pushed inwards and the bottom is moved outwards which is the exact opposite to what we need in this situation uh thinking about it there is at the end of the dowel rod a little washer between it and the side of the pot i might have to shorten the screw a little bit but perhaps if we do that we can get enough pressure just remove that washer get enough pressure on that to sort of pull things inwards a little bit it's not located in the the best spot for this because it's like right in that mid point of the pot we'll see what it does i suppose the other thing one could do if one had lots of time and money is come up with a coordinator rod sort of system with a turnbuckle that would be closer to the back edge of the pot turn that up and tighten it the other thing that we can do is put a couple of little shims down between the end of the neck and the surface of the pot up here try to kick it back a little bit doing an actual neck reset on this you know cutting and scribing things that's probably more than we have in the budget for this one i'm kind of running out of my time so you know i'll do these methods and then we'll see where we're at we might not be able to use the standard bridge on this thing at all okay with the washer removed we're down kind of respectable on the low bridge not great but sort of what you would expect to find in a banjo of this vintage in this condition so um i think i should try and shim and see what happens then maybe we can kick this back a little further i'm cutting some birch veneer that's about a sixteenth of an inch thick and i'm installing that actually between the tone ring and the end of the neck okay so that's actually perfect for the low bridge um it sounds okay it doesn't sound great i'm gonna see if i can put a second piece of veneer in there kick it back a little further see what happens and i'll make a bridge that is taller than this one maybe it's not going to be full standard height but i want a bit more break angle and see if we can get a little bit more sound out of it have i mentioned how much i hate the restringing process with this thing [Music] all right with that second shim these strings are sitting right on top of the frets [Music] so that means if i make the bridge about 5 30 seconds of an inch taller than this one here we'll be right about where we want to be i think you can see why you're going to want two sets of strings if you're going to do a setup on one of these especially with this tailpiece and if you remove the neck five or six times that's not going to intonate very well okay the tuners on this thing are really really bad old friction tuners there's nothing like them um the owner has ordered some new ones they'll take a little time to come in so this is as far as i'm gonna go with this one today it's back in one piece the action is nice it's playable probably plays better than at any point in its history to be honest [Music] let's jump forward three days briefly here as i do a quick little wet sanding with 1200 grit sandpaper and then i will polish up the finish repair using auto body compounds with the truss rod stuck where it is we're just getting away with it it's around 14 000 worth of relief which is it's okay trying to do setups on kit guitars or hobbyist projects it's always a can of worms it's the little stuff it sort of nickels and dimes you to death like in this case i can't lower the bridge pickup enough so that when you're playing in the upper register the strings aren't contacting it because the spring on the pickup was cut too short there's not enough adjustment on there so i'm gonna have to take everything out again put a longer spring in oh nice pickups are out of phase with each other up next we've got a concert quality classical guitar this is a double top from a very reputable maker and the new owner received it just over a week ago and it's got some buzzing issues going on specifically when playing rest strokes on the fifth string here [Music] fifth fret is fine sixth fret there's a lisp seven eight nine ten it starts to disappear eleven is almost gone twelve is fine so i've been asked to do a little assessment here this guitar came with two different saddles and the owner switched them assuming that maybe the buzz was coming from the saddle but no um action seems reasonable i'm gonna check out the neck relief here i've got a straight edge right on top of the frets and we're around eight or nine thousandths in the center of the board so there's some relief there should be okay so like i just told the customer i think this might require more than simple spot dressing as the problem is pervasive over a number of strings and in different locations on the fingerboard probably the best thing to do would be to put it on the neck jig hold it under simulated tension and then we'll level and re-crown the whole board at once but that's a big expensive job on an absolutely brand new guitar and really it's still under warranty as far as i'm concerned classical guitars do tend to be very temperamental at the beginning of their lives and this is one of the frustrating things that happens when the maker is a great distance away adjustments like this get very expensive when shipping is involved so i need to make sure the player and the builder are on the same page with what's going to happen to this thing before i touch it and so we'll call it a day there you have it uh being a repair person can sometimes mean working on vastly different instruments on the same day there's always a surprise or two anyway thanks for watching i'll see you again soon

Channel: twoodfrd

Views: 241,262

Keywords:

Id: rPdPDkFJIIg

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020