Guitars are meant to be played and enjoyed, so it always makes us smile to see one that has clearly been doing just that. This 1957 Martin 000-18 wouldn’t color its hair to hide the gray; it wears its age proudly.  So we put away the airbrush and the buffing wheel  and focused on getting it structurally stable and playing better than ever. It took a neck reset, refret, and some sealing of cracks to get it there, but the results were worth the effort.

The cracks on the sides are pretty severe. It will take some patching and, okay maybe a little touch-up to get them stable.

Here, Dan gets the side pieces to fit together perfectly before gluing and clamping them back together.

He fills the larger gaps with mahogony and colored epoxy, then files it level.

Some stain and grain lines were enough to make these patches look like they belong.

Next it’s on to the neck reset. This is a well-known and well-documented procedure where the neck is removed from the body and the dovetail joint is re-shaped to achieve correct playing action. More than 50 years of steel strings pulling on the neck has compressed the wood inside the joint and made the strings sit unbearably high.

Not every guitar is worth the trouble and expense involved in a neck reset, but a Martin holds its value very well. Even one that looks old and worn out like this is a no-brainer for this job.

First we use an electric heating element to soften the glue under the fretboard tongue.

Once the tongue is loose from the body, we drill 2 small access holes through a fret slot and inject steam from an espresso maker to loosen the glue inside – the second hole provides a route for the steam to escape. The wooden jig helps push the neck out of the dovetail joint once it comes loose.

Once the neck is off, we quickly remove the old glue residue from both the neck and body before it hardens and prepare both the neck pocket and the neck heel for resetting.

Dan uses a razor sharp chisel to remove tiny layers of mahogany from the neck heel. Then to really zero it in, he pulls strips of sandpaper to make tiny adjustments until the angle is just right.

We like to say that baseball is called a “game of inches” and guitar repair is a game of thousandths of an inch. Each pull of sandpaper changes the angle ever so slightly; so he counts how many pulls he does on one side of the neck heel, then does the same number of pulls on the other side.

When the neck angle is just right, it gets firmly clamped and glued back into place. When the glue is set, it’s time to replace the old frets.

To soften any glue inside the fret slots, Dan heats each fret with a modified soldering iron and carefully pulls it out.

Once the frets are out, he uses a carpenters level and adhesive sandpaper to level the fret board.

Next he cuts each new fret and hammers it home.

The new frets have to be trimmed, shaped, and leveled before polishing.

Since the new frets sit slightly taller than the old worn ones, we made a new bone nut. This lets the strings clear the fret tops without buzzing.

The improved neck angle allows us to get the playing action perfect, with enough saddle left for adjustments over the coming years.

A neck-reset can effectively give an old guitar like this a new life, promising many more years of music. It would have been a shame to hang this guitar on the wall when that 50 year old wood makes such a sweet sound!

This 1960 Gibson Les Paul Jr. is a terrific playing and sounding specimen. But it sure didn’t come in looking this great. After the owner picked it up in an auction, he emailed us some rather scary pictures of some truly scary looking “repairs” he hoped we could correct. We assured him we could make it look great and, more importantly, play great again. When it arrived from Florida, we took some deep breaths and assessed the damage.

The first thing that jumped out was a nasty headstock break with an awful looking mix of glue, epoxy, and maybe some bondo caked around the outside. Yuck.

Next there was a deep crack in the neck heel…

…and a large chunk that had broken off and been glued back onto the lower bout.

Finally there was an odd look to the ends of the fretboard. Can you see what’s wrong?

The fretboard has been removed and re-glued – in the wrong spot! That gap between the fretboard and pickguard (above) tells us that the previous repairman slid the board to the back of the nut shelf rather than the front, leaving A) no place to put a nut and B) a scale length that is off by nearly a quarter of an inch. So we knew the fretboard had to be removed and re glued in the right position.

The dots come out and the board comes off. The rather stingy amount of glue residue under the fretboard is yet another mark of the sloppy work that was done before.

At this point, we noticed another problem; the neck itself was loose where it joined the body. So we steamed it off the rest of the way and reglued it properly.

Once the neck and body are properly joined, we can move on to leveling the gluing surface between the neck and fretboard materials and gluing the fretboard on again.

With the fretboard in the right spot, there is once again a nut-shelf.

Now we can start cleaning up the messy headstock. We begin by smoothing away the rough globs of paint and glue from the previous work and using a leveling compound to make the surface level and smooth.

We do the same for the back of the headstock – which already makes it look much better.

It’s still an ugly looking repair, but to make sure it would hold, we put strings on and applied even more clamping pressure (to see if it came open.) It surprisingly held fast and strong. So the previous repairman avoids the shutout and manages to at least get this part of his repair right!

After applying some red finish to match the original color, Dan draws in grain lines by hand.Then he shoots clear top-coats of nitrocellulose lacquer, blending it in to the original finish. He does the same for the crack at the neck heel.

For the body crack, we wanted to take a minimal-impact approach. So we used a colored filler to level the area around the break and again sprayed a light coat of nitrocellulose to blend it in.

Once the new nitro finish is cured, we can level and prep the fretboard and hammer in new frets.

Finally, we go back to the crack repairs and distress the new finish to make it look like nothing ever happened.

This classic guitar looks great again and is ready for many more years of music.

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. 

In the early 1970’s, Mossman guitars experimented with an internal bracing pattern that was intended to reduce mass and increase volume. The company’s guitars from that period were built without a large spruce brace or strut that is traditionally placed above the sound hole.  In its place were two tiny braces and a pair of mahogony “feet” that protruded lengthwise from the head block (the head block is a block of wood inside the guitar where the neck is attached.) In the photo below, we’re looking through the sound hole at a mirror aimed up at the feet. Guitar repairmen before us have dubbed this Mossman condition “The Agony Of The Feet.”  The new brace will go between the two skinny ones.

Above, you can see that the two skinny spruce braces that pass underneath the feet are tapered down to almost nothing, then notched in the middle (to accommodate a truss rod wrench.) Not a whole lot of strength there. As a result, once the guitar hits 30/35 years the neck has shifted substantially – raising the action and making a neck reset necessary and long overdue. A quick check of the bass side action shows it to be more than 5/32″ – substantially higher than we’d like. The bridge saddle was too low to bring down any further, so a neck reset is in order.

Like lots of 30+ year old guitars, this one will also need a new pickguard.

First we heat the fretboard tongue, loosening the glue that holds it to the top surface. These guitars used a simple two-bolt neck joint rather than a dovetail, so we don’t need to steam off the entire neck.

With the neck off, Dan chisels a hole between those two skinny braces. Through this hole, he’s able to cut through the “feet,” creating a space big enough to accommodate a custom-made full size brace.

Here’s that new brace being glued into place. Looks stronger already!

After resetting the neck angle and re-installing the neck, it’s time to spruce up the fretboard. After 35 years of wear and tear, it’s ready for a face-lift. Yuck.

Dan removes the old and pitted frets, then levels the fretboard to create a true and even surface for the new frets.

After carefully hammering each fret into place by hand, he trims and shapes the fret ends and dresses the new fretboard.

Here’s a look at the new bone saddle – tall enough for many more years of playing.

Playing action for both guitars is now low and comfortable.

Both of these Mossman guitars sounded truly great when the work was complete. They required an extensive restoration, but the owners both agreed it was worth the trouble and expense.

Another Mossman attack averted.

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.

Here you can see the string action where the neck joins the body.  It’s what some guitarists might consider playable, but with his arthritis, it was just too uncomfortable for the owner to play.

If the saddle were sitting up nice and high like on a newer guitar, we could lower it to bring the strings down. But if we did that here, the strings would not not have enough downward pressure or break-over to produce a strong sound. It would end up sounding like a sitar. So we’ll need to remove and reset the neck angle and replace the saddle with a taller one.

The Mossman utilizes a neck joint that is part bolt-on and part glued mortise and tenon so after removing the bolts, we need to loosen the glue by injecting steam into the neck pocket. At that point the neck comes off rather easily.

Then Dan re-shapes the neck heel so that it will join the body at the correct angle.

Then he re-attaches the neck to the body.

As with most neck resets, we’ll also level and refret the fretboard.

Finally, this 30 year old Mossman is ready to go with easy action even with a new taller saddle.  It should easily have another 30 years of  music ahead of it.

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.

First, let’s get that old fretboard off of there. Using an electric heating blanket, we soften the glue that holds the ebony fretboard to the mahogany neck.

Next, we gently work a spatula between the pieces until the fretboard pops off.

At this point we’ll need to prepare the neck for a new fretboard by sanding the surface level. Then the new fretboard gets glued into place and trimmed to fit the neck. Between the heat, removing the old fretboard, and shaping the new one, the finish gets pretty  roughed up so we strip and refinish the entire neck.

Next it’s time to rout channels for the new pearl inlays and glue the new pieces into place. Then we level the whole fretboard to clean it up and get ready for fretting.

After leveling and cleaning the new fretboard, Dan hammers in the frets, making sure each one is seated perfectly.

A fresh set of strings and The Works setup later, this bass is ready to make some new music!