The Hub

I need some suggestions from the many great repair senseis out there.The customer is fine with a structural repair and not concerned about making it invisible. I told him you will see anything I do. He was fine with that and has a budget of between $700-1000. It's a clean break. nothing missing, It closes tightly.. I was thinking either 1) the generic double splines one on either side of truss rod and touchup as best I can. Or 2) the ab…

I am retopping a guitar and while it's open I want to reduce the mass of the back braces. Since the sides are in the way, I can't figure out how to cleanly cut the excess brace wood away; anything I've tried involves the handle hitting the sides and preventing a controlled, clean cut. Is there a tool - say a "pull finger plane" - that I can pull from the edge to the middle of each brace to facilitate this?

I have a Favilla Classical guitar on the bench, in for a bridge reglue. This is a low to mid-range classical guitar, made circa 1960, and it's an heirloom guitar for the customer, he basically wants it back in playing shape. The story is that he went away on vacation, and when he returned the bridge had delaminated from the top and took a fair amount of finish with it. It also appears that someone attempted to glob on superglue at some…

Does anyone have a STL for a routing template that will sit square on a les paul body? I need to cut a P90 hole into a middle position, and it would be nice to use the router, rather than chiseling the edges...

I had a bridge replacement in which the top surface (laminate) had been badly damaged during a prior repair. The first picture shows the extent of the tear out, including one large area and many smaller defects in the top layer. The surface was cleaned of all the old glue and primed with dilute hide glue. A piece of poplar veneer was glued in the largest defect and a hot slurry of hide glue and fine poplar dust was spread across the res…

I’ve had a customer come to me wanting to electrify the guitar without any modifications to it. No drilling, routing etc. I did convince him an end pin jack would be the only mod I would make, and he was ok with that. After a little thought, I thought, a K&K with a microphone (K&K Mini Pro) might work, using the transducers on the six string side and the microphone on the ten string side. I have no doubt the transducers would work fine.…

I've had a customer come to me wanting to electrify the guitar without any modifications to it. No drilling, routing etc. I did convince him an end pin jack would be the only option, and he was ok with that. After a little thought I thought a K&K with a microphone (K&K Mini Pro) might work, using the transducers on the six string side and the microphone on the ten string side. I have no doubt the transducers would work fine. My concern…

Hey everyone, I wanted to do a bit of a follow up on a repair I'm doing. A customer brought in a Seagull acoustic guitar that had been dropped, causing the heel block to separate. I managed to get that glued back together with pleasing results, however I did need to take the neck off by removing the two bolts which thread into the heel block, and unglued the fretboard extension. All went well here, although I'm left with a situation whe…

Hi everyone! I'm trying to wrap my head around this problem. I was doing some fret on a throwaway neck and found a couple of uneven frets in the middle of the neck. (I made sure to seat them down before levelling too!) While levelling, I came across an issue where the first few frets and the last few frets were being sanded down before the middle frets. I did make sure the neck was straight with a notched straight edge and the StewMac n…

Hello all, A customer dropped a recent American Professional II Strat to have a Double-tap humbucker installed at the bridge. I rewired the guitar following Fender's schematic (see below) and installed a stacked 250 and 500k volume pot, treble bleed PCBs and push-push coil split/tap for this pickup. All went very well, until I tried it at switch position 2. Sure enough, the new unit does not play well with the others and combining delive…

Hello everyone, I use a Stewmac japanese fretsaw (which produces .023" wide fretslots, matching the width of the tang of stewmac wire) to recut my slots on refrets. The saw does a good job making the slots deeper, but struggles to make them wider and binds like crazy throughout the process. I think that is due to it not having enough (or any) set, so in theory it only cut downwards and does a poor job removing material from the slot wall…

Hello, I am building a bass VI for a customer. As with a Fender Bass VI he wants a control plate with 4 slide switches. 1 on/off switch for each of the 3 pickups, but with the 4the switch he wants to control the phase of the middle pickup. Any suggestions as how I should wire that? thanks!

Hi fellow loothers! :) Now, I am not an electronics guru. I can follow a nice graphical wiring diagram when hooking up electronics. I have a friend who wants to utilize a superswitch in his Stratocaster like this: Position 1: Bridge Position 2: Bridge + Middle (series) Position 3: Middle Position 4: Middle + Neck (series) Position 5: Neck I have searched the internet. Either I am not good enough at searching, or it doesn't exist. And that could…

This may have been covered in any number of vids by Big Daddy Proper or Paw Paw Erlewine, but I wondered how flay everyone goes when it comes to fretboard prep and refrets. For example, I currently have an old 70s SG needing a refret, Ive begun to flatten the board. I have some low spots in the middle of some frets in "cowboy-zone", but the actual fret slots are all being touched by the leveling bar, and thus, level. This is usually whe…

I have a customer with a PRS Semi Hollow Special 22, it features two Duncan humbuckers in the bridge and the neck, and also a Narrowfield pickup in the middle. He wants to drop the volume pot down from 500k to 250k to have the humbuckers a bit darker overall. The issue that he has with this is the middle pickup is already quite dark, and how wants to retain its sound. I was wondering if adding a resistor of 250k to the hot lead coming f…

Ok. I am stumped. PRS Studio is in. 3 pickups. 5-way selector switch. 2 pots. Here's the dilemma: Customer wants two concentric pots installed. The front pot would be volume for the neck & middle pickups on the top knob, the bridge volume bottom knob. The rear knob is for tone. Top knob controls neck & middle pickups tone, bottom controls the bridge tone. I've gotten the skeleton of this sort of figured out but I don't....ha ha? The PRS 5-way…

Hello! This is my current build! https://www.instagram.com/p/DMO6PqXRAkg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MWdhbW4wdG51bDJ4ZQ== "Here’s a quick check-in on the two guitars I’m currently working on. The bodies are getting ready for binding(arm bevel too!), while the neck is in the middle of headstock design. For the tiger-patterned guitar, I’m planning to inlay Jakho-do (Korean tiger-and-magpie painting) with mother-of-pearl. The other one…

Hey everyone! I'm finishing up my latest build and looking for help with the wiring. It's a 3-pickup configuration with a standard 3-position toggle switch. The plan is for 3 pots: master volume, master tone, and a volume just for the middle pickup (as a blend so that it can be added in any position). The 3-way toggle will be a standard Neck - [Neck + Bridge] - Bridge. I looked through @member ' excellent book and didn'…