The Hub

Well, I am pulling my hair out here... just did a compression fret job on a 2017 D18 Authentic 1939. Neck had severe excess relief, so I pulled the frets, planed the board flat, and got to work....done this a handfull of times, so I wasnt expecting anything out of the ordinary...... I got a handful of frets in, checked my relief by stringing up the guitar, and decided I need to keep pushing, so I got a full set of frets in and som…

Hi all, I am a newer guitar tech and after dozens of repairs this particular Simon & Patrick Luthier Cedar top SP6 acoustic dreadnought from the 90-ies with a bolt-on maple neck has been an incredible challenge. It came with a maxed out and stuck truss rod with a considerable up bow in the neck, extremely low saddle with barely any string break angle, so it needed a neck reset. Later on I figured out that it also has a pretty dras…

I'm restoring an old parlor guitar. I have just discovered that it plays 20 cents sharp. Thats not in and of itself a mystery, usually. This guitar however has exactly the same distance from the nut to the 12th fret, and from the 12th fret to the "saddle" which is now a small shim under the two E strings both are 12 3/32"...with room in front of the bridge pins to finesse the location of the saddle slot, which I have not routed yet) I s…

I bought the StewMac fret jaws and am hoping to sell the heavy press. I can't imagine shipping it but if you're in Northwest Alabama come by and buy this from me. Buddy Guy is playing here at the end of the month and we have Jason Isbel and the Drive By Truckers playing here for Shoals Fest some time this summer.

I have a Kalamazoo made epiphone with the most extreme fingerboard ramp I have seen. I have the neck dead straight from 1st fret to body joint and get a 1/16 of gap when I run a straight edge from 1st fret to the last fret. The frets average .040" but someone leveled the extension and those frets are half the height. Does anyone have any suggestions for flattening the extension. Clamping a block on it? If I level the board during a r…

A new one for me... joint is pretty much centered between 12th and 13th.

Hi there! Working on a Squire Vintage Modified Jag. relevelled and crowned the frets. Lovely job. Set the relief and action to factory spec. So far so good. With a capo on the first fret, I set the string radius at the saddles to 9.5" using an under-string radius gauge, everything lined up nicely... ...but when I measured the action of all the strings along the 14th fret using my digital nut slotting gauge (expecting a unifo…

Hey everyone, I'm a technician at a music production school in London. As the most 'guitariest' technician on staff, I've become the de facto guitar maintenance person. A big part of my work is taking a look at each guitar once a week. Usually my "routine" is to check action and intonation, making adjustments if needed, then cleaning/polishing. The thing I struggle with the most is getting strings feeling good. We use D'Addario…

Just sharing some info to procrastinate my nth attempt at getting this thing together. and some venting. If you get one of these in with electronic issues, estimate high. Customer brought in a Gretsch Rally in pieces that he picked up from the last repairman (who died), and just wants it to play. Minor binding repair and a weirdly-angled zero fret were relatively easy to deal with. The dead electronics are the main problem.…

It would be helpful what this group is doing regarding fret glues, no glue, wicked-in thin CA, slot fill medium CA +/- acceleration, aliphatic? What do folks like/dislike and why? Do you practice differently bound vs unbound? How do you minimize cleanup after thin CA? Does it matter acoustically if the frets are glued? It adds time and the risk of a CA mess to the job … Thanks

Hello- does anybody on here have access to a trans-trem equipped Steinberger who could measure the location of the trem cavity for me? Like the distance from the zero-fret to the front edge of the trem unit perhaps? That would be great! Can’t find anything online. Apparently there’s a website that has schematics of one but it’s all in German. So if you speak German that might work too!

Hi everyone, Every once in a while, I come across a bass that simply refuses to stop buzzing. Right now, I’m working on a bass (I won't name the brand, but it’s in the €2,500 range) that has a slight fretboard hump near the neck pocket. I figured that was the culprit, so I performed a fret level under string tension. The frets are now perfectly level... yet, it continues to buzz across the entire fretboard, even with fairly high a…

Hi all, new to nut slot work world, please can you help me with this mystery? fret levelling, neck relief and string action adjustment all completed to Fender 9.5" radius spec. very happy with that. the next step: 0.011” High E string’s nut slot was a bit low. I used Dave Johnson’s (MI Guitar Craft Academy) “q-tip slot raising method”: the pulled cotton strand, plus extra thin CA glue, to fill the slot, then trim it off once dry,…

I have a customer with a guitar that has an intonation issue. It plays flat at the first and second fret on the D and G string. The factory spec says its a 25.5 scale but I measure from the nut to the 12th fret 12 5/8. I plugged the number for a 25.25 scale into the Stew Mac fret board calculator and the measurement is off from the nut to the first fret. Unfortunately I now longer have the guitar in my possession so I cant tell you exac…

Hi, thanks for this great resource. This is my first post here. I work on my own instruments and have little experience with advanced repairs. Recently I acquired a ca. 78 Sigma DR28H. I bought it because it sounded great and came with a pickup installed. I wanted something for open mics and gigging. With light strumming it sounded fine but I found some buzzing when I took it to a jam. I made a nut and saddle , adjusted the truss…

Hello everyone, I hope you're doing good. I'm very much a new guitar repair enthusiast, any advice or feedback would really appreciated. I'm working on this Yamaha FG410A, as you can see, it's in rough shape. The guitar lived in a case in a storage container since the 90s. The guitar was really dry when I got it, so I started my slowly introducing moisture. I removed the frets and then put the guitar in a bag, with a hygrometer…

Can anyone recommend a good substitute for Johnson's Paste Wax? We're down to about 1/3 of a can, and it appears that it's no longer being manufactured, and I'm not too keen on paying some of the prices I've seen around online.

I’m about to do my first ebony fingerboard replacement and wondered if there was any advice, compared with rosewood fingerboard construction. I plan to use the small aluminum jig and fret saw to cut the slots manually, indexing off the old fingerboard. Thanks for any advice or encouragement!