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Hi All, I wanted to check in with folks in the industry and ask for some advice. I have been on a building Hiatus for a number of years now (Hand Injury, Medical Issues). Things have gotten much better, and I am fully able and capable of building once again. The 2nd biggest hurdle I have had was a lack of opportunity for shop spaces to build. I now have a viable workspace and full use of my hands once again to build. The problem is that, o…

The tuner app I’ve used regularly on my smartphone for years has slowly become bloated with useless features, heavy, and totally impractical. I tried a few alternatives, but I didn't really like any of them. Since we are the kind of people who prefer to just build things ourselves when we need them, I decided to built my own tuner: completely free, ad-free, and actually effective. I even threw in some links to my social media. I think I'l…

Hello! Im working on a repair for a cutsom build for a customer. Its a Dunable Yeti built in 2022. Anyway, all work was going fine till testing the rod... i discovered that the rod is working the opposite of how it should function on any other guitar. CCW is tightening (and no, no a dual action rod) Tightening this rod is adding relief. The guitar already had too much when disengaged. Trying to figure out how to approach this as this is a f…

Question about splines: At what point are they necessary? My question is primarily regarding the crack to the left between the bridge and the sound hole as well as the crack at the upper bout that runs along the fingerboard extension. I have already glued them both and used the TJ cleats that run the full length of the cracks. I have already splined the lower bout crack that runs from the bridge to the binding as it was super gappy and d…

(for background context, I'm probably in the dozens of fret jobs so far, and no I don't let frets leave my house like this) When I got started getting interested in building guitars, I got the StewMac bundle of fret files/book, which comes with the concave toothed file. Over time, I ended up getting both the Narrow/Medium and Wide/Jumbo files. I don't do it often, but occasionally I do something like shown in the picture, where I'm clearl…

Hi Folks Newbie here so please bear with me. I have a lovely early 90's Yamaha LD-10E acoustic in for repair, I think all solid wood? made in Indonesia and a lovely sounding instrument, however the electrics are letting it down. The pre-amp has a PCB populated with SMD electrolytic caps. Many of these have leaked and destroyed the PCB pads underneath. Repairing the traces is nigh on impossible so it looks like I'll have to replace t…

Hello again folks, how is everyone! So I'm curious about what people here think about re-tops, who's done them, and what sorta ballpark rates you've charged for past completed jobs. I've got a bit of a wild one here, so strap in if you've got a couple minutes for story time! Back in 2012, I traded an HD28V of mine for a cool 1966 D-35 that needed some work. Basically, the body and neck of the guitar were fine apart from…