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.

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 »

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

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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Hold on there! Refinish a vintage Gibson? In candy apple red?? There better be a darn good reason to do something like that… and there was.

As mentioned in previous posts, the guitar repairman’s rule of thumb with vintage instruments is to leave it in as close to original condition as possible while still maintaining its playability. In the case of this 1960’s Gibson ES-355TDC, a couple of previous repairs have left it far from its original condition. When it arrived, the most obvious change was that it had been painted white years earlier and that white finish was flaking off in big chunks. A little closer look revealed a headstock repair the likes of which we’ve never seen. Throw in some long ago water damage, cracks in the body, and stains in the wood and the vintage value of the guitar is pretty well gone. You may as well paint it blue; or as the owner of this guitar decided, candy apple red. Continue »

*Beware: another one of those ‘I found this vintage Les Paul in my dad’s closet’ stories follows. I like to think that if my dad had one of these in his closet I’d have found it by now.

This 1956 Les Paul Junior belongs to a friend who, yes, found this guitar in her dad’s closet. But she couldn’t play it because there’s a pretty obvious piece missing: the entire headstock! This isn’t your average reglue job. This will require building a new headstock, replacing the truss rod, and making it look as if nothing ever happened. Read on to see how. Continue »

Watch how we restore a vintage guitar that was quite literally “trashed.”

If your 1963 Polaris White Gibson SG Junior had a broken headstock, you wouldn’t throw it in the garbage would you?  Well the lucky new owner of this guitar found it sticking out of a Chicago trash can with all of its original parts! He brought it to us to repair, still amazed by his fortune.

After the head shaking and jaw dropping was finished, we got down to making this gorgeous vintage piece look and sound like nothing happened. Continue »

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 »

It’s hard to say how many times we’ve repaired a guitar that was damaged by airline baggage handling.  It’s a big number though. This Martin 000-15 had a rough flight and split open like a can of beans. Unfortunately the damage was bad enough that sizeable pieces of the side were missing completely. For this repair, we needed to repair the cracks, replace the missing areas, and touch it up to make it look like it never happened. Make sure your seat is in the upright position; this ride gets bumpy.

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If you really think about it, a steel string acoustic guitar is trying to break itself from the first time you string it up.  It’s two pieces of wood (a body and a neck) that are glued together with metal strings tied to the opposite ends of both pieces. When you tighten those strings up to pitch, they put over 150 lbs of pressure on that glue joint; extrapolate that over 20 or 30 years and it makes sense that the wood gets compressed and shifts position a little. The result is that the neck angle changes and string action slowly gets higher and higher. So as techs, we chase that changing angle by lowering the saddle a bit every time we set it up. Eventually we run out of saddle material and need to reset the neck angle.

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Sometimes braces come loose inside guitars as they grow old and dry out. When there’s a big circular soundhole to reach through, those repairs are easy enough. But in this guitar’s case, there are a pair of slender F holes and one brace that’s come completely out. The only way to get it glued back into place is to remove the entire back. Doing that to a guitar made in the early 1940’s means opening up a time capsule that hasn’t been seen by anyone since it left the factory. Continue »

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. Continue »