Sometimes we have to get a little creative with refinishing. Here’s what happens when someone wants an unusual color for their guitar.

We had a couple of unusual projects recently that required some creative work with color. The owners of both this 70’s Fender Precision Bass and a modern Gibson SG knew they wanted to refinish their instruments, but wanted to do something a little more unique than just choosing a standard Fender or Gibson color.  Interestingly, both ended up with colors more reminiscent of  vehicles than other musical instruments. Continue »

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 »

“An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.”  In this post, we’ll break down the best way to protect your guitar in the cool months ahead.

Chicago winters kill guitars. The weather gets dry and cold, so we turn on our furnaces – drying out the air in our homes even further. Many will see their indoor relative humidity drop below 20% . That’s 25-30% lower than the factories where guitars are made and the wood just doesn’t like it. Like the skin on our fingertips and the seams on our hardwood floors, dry guitars can split open without ever being dropped or otherwise mishandled. Other symptoms we see include:

• rough fret ends that stick out past the edge of a fretboard
• loose bridges and braces
• loose neck joints
• separations along the many glue joints that hold a guitar together
• dramatic changes in playing ‘action’

So what can you do to prevent costly repairs to these problems? There’s so many choices hanging in guitar stores that it can be hard to tell which one to buy. We may kick ourselves for giving away the secrets that keep us in business – but here’s a look at the products that will best help you keep your guitar healthy and happy this winter. You’ll also find a simple formula for how to effectively use them.

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Lenny Davidson of the Dave Clark Five pays us a visit.

A favorite customer and friend of ours came in with his father to get a little work done on dad’s travel guitar.  Some of the tuning gears had been stripped to Bits and Pieces so we installed a new set and strung it up. Dad, as it turns out, is Leonard “Lenny” Davidson of The Dave Clark Five. He was kind enough to tell some great stories of playing alongside a 14 year old Jimmy Page, of playing The Ed Sullivan Show and Carnegie Hall, and of a ‘61 Strat he kind of wishes he hadn’t sold for 70 pounds. The DC5 were inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and here’s some excellent video of that night.  Thanks for the visit and for snapping a picture with us.

In this post, you’ll see how we tackle a very difficult neck re-repair on a Chicago-made Lyon and Healy Style-A Mandolin.

A new customer brought us a remarkable and beautiful Lyon & Healy mandolin that was made here in Chicago nearly a century ago. This is a “Professional” or “A” Style instrument that was at the top of the company’s  line of mandolins in the 1920’s. It has a very delicate and ornate scroll headstock that unfortunately broke apart many years ago. It was fixed and the repair held for a long time before recently coming apart. Our challenge is to get the headstock solid enough to play again, while maintaining as much of the instrument’s original qualitity and character as possible. What’s more, we’ll need to work around a few unexpected elements of the previous repair. 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 »

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 »

Okay Blueshawk fans, we know what you’re thinking; there’s no such thing as a Blueshawk bass. Well, thanks to a tag-team effort, there is now. This was truly one of the most challenging electronics customization projects we’ve ever done and it turned out great. **Beware** though, this one gets technical!

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