Month: August 2024

If you didn’t know what the picture above shows, it is the neck block of a guitar, and loose from the bottom at that.

Incidentally, this is just the second Paul Reed Smith that I have seen in the six years since I have returned to India.

This was parlour-sized electro-acoustic instrument and the owner came in with a complaint of high action. But as I looked at the bridge to see if it was lifting, there was only dust that I saw.

Yes, but it did have a tall, handsome bone saddle and a nut to match

and more dust on the headstock!

And that was not all. Take a look at the fretboard

Strangely, the young man did pull out the instrument from a gig bag, which may only mean that only recently did the instrument find its way into the bag, after it had collected enough dust.

Anyway, pushing the dust out of my mind, I got thinking, ‘if the bridge has not come unglued, then why is the action so high?’ Still thinking, I turned the guitar around, more absent-mindedly than with the hope of finding something.

And there it was

If you can’t see it the area under the heel both to the left of it and right – a good six inches – the binding had come loose. As I pointed it out to the owner, he pointed out this to me

There was a very faint crack adjacent to the heel. But it didn’t strike me. I told the owner that he would have to live with it because there is no way to get any kind of glue into it because it is not a complete crack. In fact, I remember picking up the thinnest feeler gauge and trying to push under the neck block just to show that that area was solid

Later, after the owner had gone and I began pushing and prodding, I noticed the back move upwards in the area under the neck block, when I tried pushing it up. Indeed, the neck block had got loose from the bottom, and thus the raised action.

Immediately, I glanced at the left shoulder of the guitar. And there it was: the twin of the crack on the right shoulder.

I then went about looking for loose braces that may have got dislodged in what must have been a bad jolt the guitar suffered, but thankfully, I didn’t find any.

And so began the glue up(s).

After I did the binding and clamped it up, I left the instrument to rest for two full days.

Then it was the turn of the neck block to get back into position.

Another two days and things seemed to have come together nicely.

Next came work on this portion of the binding

That too was glued.

The owner had also talked about a buzz on the ‘e’ string. As I went about with my rocker finding  a high fretwire, I found two.

Can you see the marker on the outside two fretwires? Those two were higher than the Burj Khalifa!

And so, work was put into them to get them to fall in line.

Later, it was the usual cleaning and scrubbing, polishing and oiling.

But I must point out this one spot on the back of the guitar.

It looked exactly like coffee had fallen and had stuck to the back. But it was easily removed

Before I threw on the strings, I decided to give the tall saddle a little shave – no measurements just a sliver taken off the bottom.

Also, the bridgepin holes of the bass strings were a little too small, holding the pins too tightly. A reamer was taken to them and the pins sat better after the treatment

The strings that the owner had chosen were these

Strung up, the guitar had the near perfect action.

The owner was pleased with the results and told me he also owned dreadnoughts from the Martin and Hertz stables. He threatened to bring those over too.

Any time, brother!

And here are the final shots of the work done and the guitar itself

Worked on this Cort recently, which had a belly and a lifting bridge – naturally, throwing the action out of sync.

It also had a tilting saddle

And it had seen cleaner days

 

But first take a look at this colourful thing.

You know how sceptical I am about bridge glue-ups in the July to October period, but since it was here, I agreed to do it with the disclaimer that I don’t guarantee a fix in the first attempt.

So, the first order of business was taking the bridge off and cleaning its underside as well as its footprint on the top. Now, this was an electro-acoustic instrument. To take the bridge off, I had to take out the piezo element. The hole through which it was threaded through the top was just large enough to pull it through, but to push it back out, it was nearly impossible.

I tried pulling out the jack to which it was attached to the EQ unit and tried pulling out the piezo element wire, and jack and all through the hole in the bridge but even that did not work. In fact, due to the pushing and pulling, this happened.

Talk about inauspicious beginnings!

I replaced the broken piezo piece with a replacement

The bridge came off  but not without leaving behind an imprint of its grain of wood in the CA deposition on the top.

And then began the arduous task of cleaning the underside of the bridge and its footprint.

When you have put in the long hours, scraping and sanding, things begin to look a lot cleaner

But there was time before the two could be brought together. First, the belly needed to be tackled, and it was.

The guitar was left clamped like this for 48 hours, yet wood is a strange thing. You might think that you’ve straightened out a curve but once a familiar stress returns (read string tension), so does the belly – if not completely, partially.

Now with things nice and flat, the bridge could go on the top.

Four days of pressure and the bridge seemed to hold. Again, this season (July to Oct, of the rains) is such that one can never be sure of any glue-up job.

While it was under clamps, it seemed the right time to take care of other smaller but important tasks, vital to contributing to the playability of your instrument

hardware on the headstock was tightened,

the headstock was cleaned up,

bridgepin ends were given a shape to give them an angle, and the tilt in the saddle was sorted out.

This is the bridge reglued, and measuring the belly, it seemed to have gone down appreciably.

The new piezo element was connected to the EQ and the element was threaded through the bridge to sit perfectly in the saddle slot. If anything, the owner is going to find the guitar more playable than he ever has. The new piezo piece is much thinner than the original, leaving more room for the saddle to sit in its slot.

Now, all that remained were strings to be put on. The owner had chosen these

However, the ‘E’ and the ‘G’ tuning machines seemed to jam halfway through the tuning. These were taken off, dismantled, treated, reassembled and put back on. Again the strings were put through them but the two tuning machines refused to work as desired.

I called up the owner and told him of the situation and he instructed me to put in new tuning machines.

And so a pack of new swanky tuning machines were pulled out

and put in place of the old ones. Thankfully, the screw holes lined up perfectly and I did not have to toil.

Here are a few last images of the guitar before I let it go.