Category: acoustic

Featured Guitar – Vintage Regal Tenor Resophonic

Sometimes the guitar itself is more interesting than the repair.  It would be a shame not to share some of those instruments. So with that in mind, presenting our first “Featured Guitar.”

Regal Tenor Resophonic Guitar Repair Continue »

Martin Headstock Repair

This Martin guitar took a serious fall, snapping the headstock off completely. See how we made it look like it never happened while keeping every bit of strength it had before.

Martin Headstock Repair

This is never how you want your Martin to look. But if your headstock does break off, you’d like to at least see a long break like this one with plenty of lateral gluing surface. Modern wood glues work their way into the pores of the wood, fusing them together again with incredible strength. Some repair shops take the approach of cutting away some of the wood and inlaying a dowel or a new piece to splice the two sides together. There are times when this is called for, but we try to avoid such measures whenever possible because it breaks and cuts even more of the wood fibers. If it ain’t broke don’t break it! Continue »

Attack of The Mossmen!

Two more vintage Mossman acoustics get the superhero treatment – a neck reset, refret, custom pick guard, and a new brace.

Mossman Acoustic Guitar Repair - Neck Reset and Refret Mossman Acoustic Guitar Repair - Neck Reset and Refret

Not long after posting photos of our previous Mossman neck reset, we received two more Mossman guitars that needed the same treatment, but with an extra necessary step. Since they received identical work, the photos in this post will jump between the two guitars. You’ll see them receive neck-resets, re-frets and that extra step – the addition of a brace that was missing in the original design. The guitar in that previous post was made a few years after these and by that time the design flaw had been remedied.  After years of not seeing this company’s guitars, it was interesting to see a number of them arrive so close to each other.  Continue »

Vintage Gibson LG-1 Top Crack Repair

A family heirloom gets a new life for the next generation of strummers.

Vintage Gibson LG1 Top Crack Repair

We weren’t sure we believed a phone caller who said his vintage Gibson acoustic guitar had a crack in the top that was open more than a quarter inch. But when he brought it in, sure enough that crack above the sound hole had buckled and bent until it was open wide. This crack likely started out as a hairline split on a guitar that hadn’t been sufficiently humidified. It wasn’t repaired right away and over time the top wood curled up and almost completely separated from the brace underneath. It’s a tricky repair that came together quite nicely. While we were at it, we reset the neck, planed the fretboard level, replaced the frets, and replaced the dried and curling pickguard with a custom-cut new guard that fit right in with this old beauty.

See how you can properly humidify your guitar to protect it from damage like this in our recent special post on guitar case  humidifiers.

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Vintage Mossman Acoustic Neck Reset And Refret

Not your average 1970’s acoustic, this Mossman South Wind is a great example of one of the better small manufacturers of that era. We reset the neck angle and refretted it for more comfortable action and sound.

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Mossman Guitars is a smaller American guitar company with an interesting history dating back to the mid 1960’s. They have always sought to focus on high quality construction and materials

The owner of this South Wind model suffers from arthritis in his hands and needs his guitars to be set up with low action. But this particular guitar, like most acoustics over 20 years old, had gradually developed an under-set neck that is evidenced by high action and a low bridge saddle. A simple set-up just wasn’t going to give us the results he needed so we opted to reset the neck angle. Continue »

Replacing A Fretboard: It’s Not As Painful As Removing A Tattoo!

Thinking of tattooing the name of that special someone on your arm? You might try inlaying a fretboard instead. At least it won’t hurt when it’s time to move on.

Fretboard replacement / inlay

The owner of this bass had the Guild custom shop inlay his wife’s name on the fretboard several years ago.  And they did a great job. The bass sounds terrific. The only problem is that they are no longer married. It seemed like time to move on, so in a relatively pain-free procedure, we replaced the fretboard and inlaid some slightly less specific fretboard markers.

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Vintage Martin 518 Repair and Restoration

A true pre-war Martin rides again with a neck reset, crack repair, and bridge reglue!

Vintage Pre-War Martin Repair

The owner of this 1930 Martin 518 saw work we performed on another Martin and entrusted us to repair a lengthy side crack, separated bridge, and to reset the neck angle. This is work we frequently perform on older Martins, but we thought you might like to see it done on a real pre-war model.

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Taylor Acoustic Guitar Top Repair

See how we improved another shop’s repair gone bad and learn how to prevent this damage to your own guitar.


A beautiful Taylor 914CE acoustic guitar came to us with two top cracks that had opened up after being ‘repaired’ by another shop (that shall remain nameless.) The previous repairman made three errors in our estimation: first, he enlarged the cracks with a small router or Dremel tool – removing too much wood in the process; second, he spliced in sitka spruce patches that do not match the original Engelmann spruce top; and third – well he just didn’t do a very good job of either since the cracks opened up again. The owner paid more than $4000 for this guitar and he wasn’t pleased with the look of the previous repair or the fact that it held for less than a year.  We made a decision to not just replace the 2 bad patches, but to replace the entire area between the cracks with a carefully chosen set of Engelmann. That turned out to make this repair less expensive to perform and gave us a much better outcome than just filling the cracks again. Continue »