A Neck Repair With Touchup
Here’s something you don’t want to see when you open your case! This is a really nice Hamer made of korina that teaches us three lessons: 1. Pop for a true-fitting hardshell case rather than an ill-fitting plastic one 2. Easy does it loading your guitar into the tour bus and 3. If you must skip 1&2, bring it to Chicago Fret Works for a flawless repair.
A friend of mine from the Chicago Guitar Center brought this Hamer Special to us with what looked like a crack in the neck heel but after removing the neck pickup we discovered it was completely broken off. We reassured him that everything would be fine and got to work.
After aligning the neck for a perfect fit, we glued the two pieces together using specially made cauls to protect the fretboard and body from clamping pressure. It came together just right but we wanted this one to be not only structurally sound but to look as if it never happened.
We matched the pale yellow tint but on a transparent finish you want to see grain, not opaque paint. So out came the colored pencils for some grain lines.
If you get the color of the grain just right, you can barely tell there was a repair at all. This one turned out really nicely. Now about that new case…
Nice work with the Prismacolors, boys! That repair’s a beauty.
Don’t Gibsons have a tenon? I’m shocked at how little glueable surface their is on that guitar. It looks like it had a pickguard which I don’t think came stock with a Hamer. Nice job!
For some reason we didn’t take a photo with the tortoise shell pick guard on, but it did actually come with one. There was a matching Junior style guitar that paired with this one. Really great guitars.
It’s been a while since we worked on this one, but if memory serves, there was a deeper tenon in the neck pocket. The problem was that the neck actually broke – and not on the glue line. So we had to work with what we had. But it’s enough; this repair will last until someone goes Townshend on it again.