So, this came in a few weeks ago. It was a pretty all-Mahogany Martin (and I got so excited I forgot to take a photograph of the label in the soundhole!!)
I looked it over and except for some battle-scars, along the lower bout periphery, could not figure out what was wrong with it. And true to a Martin, it had that beautiful mellow sound, though the action could have come down a tad.
It was left for the owner to point out this
And then as I thought, all those battle scars were in fact, repairs carried out earlier. The other side of the bout had opened up previously for there was enough glue in the area to take care of this repair!
Also, the couple of large dings and scars – all on the lower bout – were previous repairs. Pretty easy to surmise then that the instrument had had a rough ride till then.
Anyway, that was in the past. The job at hand was to stop the instrument from posing as a prop for the next edition of ‘Jaws’, and put it together. It also needed fresh strings.
Many times, when the back or the top separates from the sides more than a couple of inches, the two seams don’t want to come together. This happens especially when any seam has remained open a day too long.
But thankfully that was not the case here. Even though the seam separation was at least a foot or even 1.5 feet the two came together perfectly – thus showing that it hadn’t been long since the seam had separated.
So glue was pushed in and my trusty spool clamps, which I made almost a decade ago, were pulled out and put to work.
While this was clamped, the glue residue on the other side was cleaned up, the fretboard was paid attention to – cleaned and oiled – and the fretwires were burnished.
Strung up with fresh strings, the owner took it home with quite happy with the results.
