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.

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 »

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.

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

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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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 »