The Hub

So, I’m a month and a half into this repair business and so far so good. I think I’ve got more than adequate skills to handle the physical, customers have been coming in and balancing a relationship with starting a new business is going well. But…… The scariest thing is how to handle customers and the things they love. So far, I’ve been able to test the waters on repairing fairly inexpensive, not too attached to instruments, easing my wa…

I just opened a repair shop and the first repair was to remove a broken 1/8" hex wrench ball end from the truss rod nut of a Turner RB4 Renaissance Bass. I read of all sorts of theories on how to extract/remove. None of them had recorded actual attempts of the theories. There's probably others on here but I haven't found them. The ball end was loose and mangled at the rear of the nut sleeve. I tried fairly benign methods first. Heat…

This is my mid 50's LG-1. I had the back off to replace the bridge plate and one of the braces. I've got it all back together now but I'm lacking the knowledge to make my work disappear. I was using amber CA glue to color the binding but that didn't seem like the proper route so now I'm scraping, filing and sanding that back off and starting over. I watched Doug Proper's demonstration on liquid binding repair and that did have a lot…

Hi looths ! I return to a repair of a personal project. It had a crude end grain break, which was previously messed up with, so I cleaned one part of the break and glued everything back with epoxy. The plan was to excavate the wood from the sides and behind the break, then to add new wood, sandwiching the trussrod. Now that I've discovered the carbon fiber sheet repair, I wonder if it could be a good candidate for that, or if it'd first…

I have 1988 Gibson ES-335 with a broken headstock. It was poorly glued before and is broken again. I can't get the broken faces of the wood to close up due to the mess of glue or whatever is in there. The headstock overlay is the only thing holding it together. I have a couple of questions: - Any idea what glue was used to attach the headstock overlay? Is it easy to remove cleanly? I'd like to at least loosen the part of it on the neck…

Hi! This is a new build but suddenly it's also a finish repair. I tested Ken Parker's Epoxy + Tru-Oil approach on the fretboard of this ukulele before committing to the rest of the instrument. It's a single (very thin) coat of West System epoxy (using the clear hardener), then 3 coats (so far) of Tru Oil. It's well-cured, about three months. The bad thing happened yesterday: attempting to dress a fret end, I was using thick double-side…

Glue between the neck heel and body, ply sides and top make this a tough one even with 4 heaters. This is one where you spend several hours repairing ply separations before you can even think about doing a reset.

We hear a lot in LoothLand these days about 3D printing. I think it's an awesome use of that technology for what we all do. With my long history with AutoCad and 3D rendering in my previous life, I should pull the trigger on a 3D printer, but I'm just not ready yet AND I have no available space for one in my little shop or in my office right now. Yes, 3D printing is great, but sometimes, good ole regular printing can be a surprise frien…