Saddle slot routing jig

For years my saddle routing jig consisted of a piece of plywood with a hole in it and various pieces of taped down strips of this and that. The whole tedious and messy looking thing would corral the router into making a perfectly straight cut. Over the years I've had four pieces of plywood with a hole in it and somehow lost every one. I guess it doesn't look like anything, so it gets lost or put in unlikely places.
I spent to much time looking for the last one and decided it was time to make one I wouldn't lose. 

A top piece designed to use with a template guide was made and considered. The idea was that the slot for the guide was small enough the placement could eyeballed very close to the correct position and then fine tuned. In practice it was to hard to see where the bit was.

A larger opening to fit the whole base was a better idea. It meant that the base didn't need to be fine tuned to the template guide and there's lots of room to see what's going on. I'm still scheming on a light that will go around collet assembly, I'm pretty sure I saw something like this for screwdrivers. Initially I used a couple of scraps with two sided tape to set the length of cut.  The final design includes the knurled brass nuts with the aluminum slider.

End of story, it works really well, took a couple of hours to build and I probably won't lose this one. One other thing, it sets up a lot faster.

Loose machine head covers

Kluson style tuners with cast back covers sometimes come loose from the base. I've seen them installed on Gibsons and Martins among others. The back cover is peened onto the base, meaning there are posts that go through a hole and then they are punched or hammered in a way that makes the post mushroom and that holds it in place. Over time they can loosen and sometimes fall apart. I use a spring loaded center punch and a small anvil to repair this problem.

Shop made control knobs

To be installed: A forty year old Dearmond acoustic pickup system complete with wiring harness. 1 meg volume pot 250k tone pot I did not make a note of capacitor value.

While the pickup was sealed I'm pretty sure it's a piezo. I replaced the jack with an endpin model. Each knob required six different drill press operations, a forstner bit for the recess that covers the nut and washer, a brad point for the shaft and a plug cutter to shape the knob.

A brass insert is glued in place and threaded through the side to fit a small allen screw. This allows a small metal rod to be temporarily mounted, the while assembly is chucked in the drill press for sanding, polishing and finishing. The drill press is used again for the V and T impression which is filled with a putty pencil, polished again and installed.

Tak dot on

My customer likes the guitar but misses the fingerboard position markers. This is a job that's a bit more of a challenge with frets in. Once the layout work was done it was time to drill the holes.  To make it easier I used a drill bit  depth collar and set the depth really close to the exact thickness of the dots. After that a file did a good job of making the dot markers flush.

2006 Warwick bass with broken truss rod

The truss rod came loose in the anchor, it was threaded and then peened like the old Gibson truss rods. Unfortunately the peening broke the thread.

The fingerboard had to be removed.  Heating the fingerboard with an old clothes iron softened the glue. One hour of slow but sure with a pallet knife,  inserted between the fingerboard and the neck, separated them.

Next the filet piece has to be removed. Hot iron, screwdriver... a little less time.... the filet came out in three pieces. It was glued together and straight on an offcut (to the left of the fingerboard in the third picture), and then used as a template for the new one.

Brazing the existing anchor on the rod was opted over making a new anchor, threading it and peening again.

Glue on the fingerboard, neck and truss rod slot was removed. The neck was reassembled, and glued back together, without any issues. I like to use surgical tubing to clamp a fingerboard. It applies a tremendous amount of pressure, evenly and is somewhat self centering. Clean up is a bit tedious. 

The truss rod works perfectly and there is no evidence of the repair work.

Redbone the Cigar Box Guitar

Broken headstock Garrison guitar

I used a coffee can to scribe the circle and inlaid a piece of walnut. The walnut is book matched, it allowed me to fit the outside of headstock and trim the inside to make it fit. Normally you could trim to the outside of the head stock but I was fitting this inside the head stock binding.