Alive and Kicking

Ace Blue Bear Music School teacher, guitarist about town, and long-time customer (as in the 16 years SF Guitarworks and I have been in business “long”), Sean Leahy was given this Kamiko acoustic. Although it isn’t a high dollar guitar, it’s a high value one to Sean. He loves the sound and plays it all the time.

As is the case with many off brand guitars, this one has an interesting bridge design in which the strings enter from the front of the bridge, wrap around the back, and then up and over the saddle. It looks cool, and does away with bridge pins, but the strings cut into the bridge, as they pull directly into the rosewood.

You can see here that the G string had pulled completely through the bridge, so the guitar had been rendered unusable. Sean didn’t want to drop a bunch of cash on this one, but he wanted it to play, so I came up with an efficient, but solid, repair to get it back on the road. 

First thing was to get rid of the wrecked G string area of the bridge.  I set up a quick router fence and routed out the ripped wood. 

I then looked for a nice matching piece of rosewood, made a little plug and glued it in. 

Next I routed the wood along the back of the bridge where the strings had dug in, made a new piece for that and glued it. 

After cleaning up the glue and sanding the top of the bridge smooth, I used an aircraft bit to drill the string holes from the front through the new pieces of wood, allowing the strings to come out the back and wrap around on new wood.

Now Sean can play the heck out of it again, so this was definitely an inexpensive guitar that was worth repairing.