This is a lap steel idea I've been working on for awhile. It was black and finished with oil. I sanded back and stained again with mahogany red. The plexi fingerboard is one idea black Corian is another. Purple heart treated with vinegar and steel wool to go black with contrasting fret inlays. I'm still thinking about it.
The Charango had an accident. The top was so badly damaged it could not be repaired. I started by removing what was left of the top. I knew I couldn't use the original as a pattern but I wanted it intact enough to match the original bracing. I found a similar piece of spruce among some off cuts. After thicknessing it I traced the body outline on the spruce and cut it close to shape except for the shoulder joint.
I used a compass to trace that shape onto the new piece, it was close and after some fine tuning it fit nicely. I had to come up with a different system for gluing the top on, spool clamps weren't going to work. After a bit of research I found a technique for gluing on lute tops. It worked well and there just some refinishing to do. I decided French polishing was the best choice and I'm happy with how it turned out.
Shrunken pick guard syndrome, several manufacturers glued pickguards directly onto the wood. The pickguard would shrink and crack the top. Here's one being repaired. The guard has been removed and the cracks are being glued up supported on the bottom with small spruce cleats. I like to make mine round, it allows me to use a plug cutter and then I can thin them down to whatever thickness I want. In this case I shaped them to fit around the braces.
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.
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.
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.
