Guitar repair – Cort(ing) trouble!

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.

 

Amit Newton

An experienced guitar tech with over 10 years of experience working on acoustic Gibsons and Martins in the Gulf region. There is nothing that cannot be repaired; the only consideration is the price at which it comes. And yet, if there is sentiment attached, no price is too high! WhatsApp/Call me: 7080475556 email me: guitarguyhelp@gmail.com

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