Guitar repair – When Humpty Dumpty (#Ashton) regained his crown!!!!

I think I have worked on this instrument before – a set-up, bone nut and saddle – but I’m not very sure. But it recently came to me in this state, with the owner naturally none too happy.

He said that the instrument was in its case and when he took it out to play, he found it like this. From the looks of it, the break was along the seam of the neck joint, but it  was a break. It wasn’t as if the seam had opened up.

But besides the obvious problem, it was also apparent that the guitar was dry to quite an extent. The bridge and the fretboard bore testimony to this.

It seemed to me that the entire headstock was being held together by the cracked faceplate, which could have given way even by just trying to detune the guitar. I did that and in fact, took off the strings and the hardware on the headstock. Contrary to my fears, the two parts of the headstock stayed together, held by the faceplate.

A simple glue-up job would have sufficed, but I thought that reinforcing the joint would not hurt anybody, least of all the instrument. So, I cut four dowels to place them along the seam of the break. These I called My Four Sentinels!!!

But first the glue-up. Glue was liberally applied and then equally painstakingly taken off as it oozed out of the joint under clamps.

Thereafter, I let the instrument sit undisturbed for two days. After that period, when I took off the clamps, I knew just by looking at the joint that it would hold but I wasn’t ready to take chances.

Holes were drilled to receive My Four Sentinels and they were glued in place.

These were then shaved off to make a seamless joint with the headstock.

If you look closely enough, you will see a pencil line just beyond the two E string tuning machine holes. This was the line I drew to tell myself till where I needed to sand the entire surface.

Not very clear in the photograph, but I also drew a ‘V’ on the neck with its end point running in line with the centre line of the neck.

On the front face of the headstock too, there was a similar area marked. These had to be sanded for two reasons: a) to knock back any areas standing proud along the seam lines, and b) so that when paint is applied to the area, it has something to adhere to.

But before that the area had to be sanded

Of course, due care was taken that the name on the headstock face did not get damaged in the process.

Once this was done, the sanded area was painted dark and even got a coat of lacquer. The idea behind the effort was two fold: a) to hide the seam lines of the joint on the front and the back of the headstock, and b) to hide the existence of the dowels.

While I succeeded in my first mission, I failed in my second. My Four Sentinels still stood out proud!

To be fair, if you were to look at the instrument from even four feet away, you would not be able to pick up that the painted area was hiding a repair. It looked as if it was part of the headstock design. Besides, the owner was a stage artiste and to the first audience member, standing at least 15 – 20 feet away, nothing would be apparent.

And there we were, at the moment of truth: stringing the guitar up to see if it could take the strain of strings tuned to pitch. The strings that the owner had chosen were these

I strung up the guitar, tuned it up, and left it for a day or two to see how the instrument would react under stress.

IT HELD!!!