Check it out - this month’s Potrero View has an article on us. You may find it enlightening and entertaining:
Guitar repair is dangerous business. We’re working to tolerances as small as a thousandths of an inch, so we have to get our fingers and eyeballs closer to the action than our doctors would like to hear about. We’re constantly barraged by noxious fumes, corrosive chemicals, super sharp blades, crazy loud machines, sanding belts, flying debris, and sometimes - disgustingly guitars. One can never be too careful, so we take all the appropriate precautions:
There are lots of guitar manufacturers out there who have a custom shop division, supposedly making guitars with an attention to detail that isn’t available in their more mass produced guitars. They can get really, really expensive… but are they really worth it? For a custom guitar that can cost upwards of $4000 and more, you’d expect perfection, right? That’s not always the case…
This week we had a Fender Custom Shop Strat come in to the shop. It was a brand-new 50’s style Strat that had been heavily “reliced” to look like it had been played hard for 50 years. We were told that this guitar cost around $4000 – it should have been perfect, right? Wrong.
This Strat exhibited the same problem that we see on almost every guitar that comes into the shop: uneven frets. A poor fret job will cause a guitar to buzz and fret out all over the neck, even if the frets are only a few thousandths of an inch off. Think about it: if the next adjacent fret is higher than the one you’re on, the string will buzz against the higher fret if you have anywhere close to a low action. The problem is made even more apparent when you bend a note, especially on a neck with a “vintage” fretboard radius (7.25″ like most Strats and Teles). The note will simply choke out if the frets are uneven. There are only two ways to fix this problem: raise the action or level the frets. Since raising the action isn’t the best course of action for most people, fretwork is the only option.
We do all our fretwork on our Fretty 5000 neck jig, which simulates string tension on a neck with the strings removed. This way we can level the frets under real world playing conditions. Fretty has 5 dial indicators that are accurate to 1/1000 of an inch – so we know EXACTLY what is going on:
Once we have the neck perfectly straight, we level the frets with a precision leveling beam. Since the neck is dead straight, and the leveling beam is dead straight, then it stands to reason that the frets would all be straight, right? Well, as they say, the proof is in the pudding:
Take a close look (click on the picture for an extreme close up). You can see fret dust gathering around the frets that have been hit by the leveling beam – the 1st through 9th frets, then 17th through 21st frets. Yet the frets around the 11th through 15th haven’t even been touched. Doing fretwork takes a huge amount of patience and skill, and we don’t expect it to be perfect on a mass produced guitar. Yet this guitar is a $4000 custom shop instrument, supposedly made by the best of the best. How does this kind of thing happen? Well, it just does and that’s why we’re here…
Despite the fact that most guitar electronics utilize technology that is upwards of 80 years old, we see some rather interesting modifications in the shop. Here’s a quick list of some do’s and don’ts of guitar electronics.
Don’t – leave excess wiring inside your guitar:
Do – cut your pickup leads and other wiring to appropriate lengths. Use shrink wrap to keep all your cable runs tidy:
Don’t – make a rat’s nest inside your guitar:
Do – plan a logical wiring scheme (and use quality components):
Don’t – use random bits of copper and aluminum foil to shield your electronics:
Do – use a combination of conductive shielding paint and copper foil tape. A partial shielding job is as ineffective as no shielding at all – you must create a complete cage around all the electronics to prevent any stray hum or noise getting into your guitar:
Do – protect your guitar from melted solder and flux landing on your guitar’s finish:
Do – plan out complex wiring schemes, to keep everything clean and tidy in your control cavities. Use mini pots in tight spots:
Do – ask us for help with your electronics needs. Bring your guitar in before you’ve gone too far… wiring is a complex skill, and you can get yourself into trouble pretty quickly if you’re not sure of what you’re doing. The good thing is, any electronics mistake can be fixed. We do all wiring to NASA specs (or, at least, what we think would pass muster in a space station), and can devise a control scheme for just about any crazy idea.
Today we restored an old ’60s era Gibson EB-O. This thing had been through the ringer, and was seriously distressed, and… dare we say: funky. The fretboard was caked with dirt, the frets were turning green, the original pickup was broken, and the wiring was a disaster.
We’ve never seen a fretboard this funky. Normally, we clean and polish a board with steel wool… but this one required a chisel. Check it out:
Much better:
The original pickup was dead – in fact, it had fallen apart completely:
One of the coils was missing, so instead of having the pickup rebuilt, we opted to replace it with a Darkstar pickup. The Darkstar pickups are designed to recreate the sound of ’60s Hagstrom pickups used in Guild Starfire basses. We think they sound fantastic, and our customer approved, so we had the green light to go for it. We would have to do a tiny bit of cleaning up in the pickup cavity to get it to fit, but overall the pickup install was going to be fairly routine. That is, until we got a look at the control cavity…
This is easily the worst shielding job we have ever seen. Chunks of copper were being held in place with thumbtacks, and there were a couple of copper strips sitting on top of the pots (we have no idea what the purpose was behind that…). The wiring was terrible, with poor solder joints and cheap pots: the only way to fix this is to rewire the whole thing. We yanked out the entire wiring harness, and replaced each component with high quality Switchcraft parts. We properly shielded the cavity with conductive paint and copper tape, and wired the whole thing up and installed the Darkstar pickup:
That’s one funky, cool bass:
We set the bass up with light strings, which combined with the short scale, make this bass super easy to play. The Darkstar pickup sounds badass. This bass may have lost some of it’s funk, but none of it’s mojo.
Today, Aaron routed an Ibanez body to accommodate a new set of pickups that we were installing. The original routes were just a bit too small, so we had to make some room.
Working with a router is no joke – lose control of it just for a second, and… well, you’ll never play the violin again. Aaron firmly clamped the body to the bench, making sure to not mar the body in any way, and affixed a routing template in the proper position. We never free-hand any routing here in the shop: it’s dangerous and makes for messy routes. We want our routes to look like they came that way straight from the factory.
Here’s a shot of one of our plexiglass templates, which we use for making routes for single coil pickups:
Here’s Aaron working the router (note the safety glasses):
And getting completely covered in a blizzard of sawdust:
Aaron is using our Craftsman Professional hand router, which is a perfect tool for doing detail work like this. It’s stable, quiet, and most importantly: it slowly ramps up to speed, rather than going full tilt the moment it’s turned on, which prevents it from jumping out of the routing template and destroying the guitar and precious body parts.
The completed routes, which he painted with conductive shielding paint:
The routes look completely factory, the pickups fit right in, and nobody lost a finger. A solid win!
Most bass guitars are plagued with balance problems. The long neck, large headstock, and giant tuners all pull the bass off balance, causing the player to waste a ton of energy holding the bass up – energy that could be better used to actually play the thing.
Our friend Ron has a bass that has a balance problem that’s pretty egregious: a vintage Ovation Magnum II. This bass has a short upper horn, a mahogany neck with graphite reinforcement, and tuners that seem to weigh around 8 pounds each. As you can see here, the upper horn stops short of the 15th fret:
The solution to this problem is not to add more weight to the already heavy solid mahogany body (which wouldn’t really work anyway), but to remove weight from the headstock. Since this bass was made in the early ’70s, there have been great advances in plastics, allowing manufacturers to make tuners that are as strong as the old, heavy metal ones, but weigh much less. We found some lightweight Schaller tuners that were almost a direct replacement for the old Ovation tuners, which weigh only 50 grams each (we don’t know how much the original tuners weigh, but they feel to weigh about 4 times as much).
The new tuners have a smaller plate, and the nubs that stabilize the tuner on the back of the headstock were in different places, so we needed to do a bit of routing to get them to fit. We created a template, mapped out the placement on the headstock, drilled the new holes, and installed the tuners at a perfect right angle to the headstock sides. Ron didn’t want to fill the original holes, just in case he wanted to put the old tuners on, so we left them open (normally we would fill them and match the plugs to the original finish).
They fit perfectly, are super stable, and most importantly, dropped a ton of weight off the headstock. Ron can now play his bass without wasting energy holding the neck up. Success!
Leveling and crowning the frets during a fret job is only half the story. Each fret needs to be buffed and polished – which is sometimes the most time consuming part of the gig. Each fret is buffed with super fine, then ultrafine sanding sponges, then with 0000 steel wool, and finally polished with a dremel tool with a polishing wheel and buffing compound. It’s important to buff the frets to a mirror shine – and it’s not just for looks. A perfectly polished fret is easier to bend strings on, allowing the string to smoothly slide across the fret.
Doing this on an instrument with a maple fingerboard requires quite a bit more work than one with a rosewood or ebony board. Most maple necks have a finish on the board (some polyurethane, some nitrocellulose), and extra care needs to be taken to protect them during fretwork.
We always tape the instrument before we do the fretwork, to protect the board during the leveling and crowning process. On unfinished boards, we can simply tape them up, but on finished fingerboards, we wax the board and de-tack the tape to prevent the tape from damaging the finish. It’s time consuming, and we chew through miles and miles of tape – but it’s important to do the job right.
It’s instruments like this that should earn us an endorsement deal from 3M Scotch tapes:
And here’s a good example of why we tape them up – the polishing wheel spins pretty fast, and would damage the board if the tape wasn’t there to protect it:
The final result:
And that’s how it’s done.
We had yet another weird request today: to install an electric pickup in an acoustic guitar, with a toggle to switch between the electric and acoustic pickup. Weird? Yes. Possible? Definitely.
We made a plate out of thick black plastic, and attached it to the guitar’s top, using some holes that had already been drilled next to the soundhole (we assume they were for a previous acoustic pickup installation). We installed a Seymour Duncan Vintage Rails pickup, and a toggle switch to go between the electric pickup and the acoustic pickup under the bridge.
We think it came out pretty sweet:
Today we fixed up a Martin guitar that had several cracks in the top. To do this, we make a cleat and glue it over the crack. Sounds simple, right? The devil is in the details…
First, we make a cleat out of matching wood to go over the crack. Here, Spencer has made a perfectly symmetrical hexagonal cleat out spruce:
Next, we make a sandwich out of the cleat, some wax paper, and powerful rare earth magnets. We mark the magnet to point in the direction of the wood grain of the cleat, which will help us place the cleat in it’s proper position across the grain on the guitar’s top.
Next we apply a dab of hide glue to the back of the cleat:
Then we place the cleat across the grain (taking note of our arrow we marked on the magnet) inside the guitar – placing the cleat across the grain on the top makes the joint much stronger:
Then we put another powerful magnet on the top of the guitar, which holds the cleat in place:
The hide glue takes about 24 hours to dry completely – once dried, the cracked top is stronger than ever before.