This wins the award for strangest instrument to come into the shop! If anyone has any information please contact me.
It is designed to be played either sitting flat like a lap steel or upright like a standard guitar. Each finger lever controls a rotating metal rod with a helical ridge that rotates. As the rod rotates the ridge contacts the string higher up the neck changing the pitch of the string. Each finer lever is geared to a rod with a wound spring that brings the rod back to it’s original position.
It has a single coil pickup, thumb activated volume control as well as master volume and tone knobs.
The engineering and construction of this instrument is very impressive.
It came into the shop with some mechanical and wiring issues which I was able to put right but beyond making it function I have no idea what to do with it! I made some videos of myself demonstrating how it functions. For more photos and videos click here.
I recently purchased a small metal lathe and milling machine and have been eager for projects to put the new tools to use. An Ibanez guitar with a Pro Rock’R brige came in recently and gave me that opportunity. The bridge was discontinued long ago and replacement parts are very hard to find. This one was missing one of the intonation adjustment screws and the nut that controls the movement of the saddle. It would have been difficult to track these tiny parts down so I decided to fabricate them.
I found this 1936 Gibson EH-150 on ebay a while back and have been slowly restoring it. I got it for next to nothing, most likely because it had no hardware and no pickup and the likelihood of tracking down these original parts is pretty slim and would be expensive. It struck me as a worthwhile project to test out building a Charlie Christian style pickup and milling the hardware from scratch. I was lucky enough to find replica knobs from Fake 58.
My good friend Gene Warner was kind enough to record a little sample (you don’t want to hear me play it!)
This Allen mandolin came into the shop missing its original bridge. The owner had several replacement options but they were all too low and wide. Using one of these as a guide I made one that matched stylistically but to the proper dimensions.
I’ve been working on this Gibson L-1 for quite a while. The major damage was to the bridge area. At some point a classical bridge had been installed to cover a large hole through the top and bridge plate. I installed a larger bridge plate to span the area, patched the top, and installed a replica of the original bridge.
I had to replace one of the braces which was cracked beyond repair and spent a great deal of time regluing the other braces. The frets required reseating and the original pickguard was reinstalled.
This is a sweet sounding vintage player. If anyone has any dating info on this guitar please let me know.
I am working on restoring a 1940′s Gibson L-1 and it is missing one of the tuner post screws. Unfortunately it is an odd size , 4-36, and I couldn’t find a replacement. By an odd stroke of luck I happened to have purchased a set of small taps and dies at the flea market many months ago and it has both the tap and die in this size. I have been buying metal working tools of late and working on my machining knowledge just for a situations like this.
Using the metal lathe I turned the screw blank to size, cut the threads by hand, chucked the screw back up and rounded the head with a file, and slotted it on the milling machine. For more pic click here.
A good friend of mine is really into vintage Epiphones and came up with the idea of making a 1958 style Crestwood with 3 New York Pickups. We used on of his Coronets as a guide and came up with this design. The pickups are rewound hotter than normals and it has a 1-2-3-All pickup selector switch. The majority of the parts are vintage in it has the ‘Silver Fox’ finish.
I finally finished restoring this ’61 SG. It needed a little bit of binding repair, filling of an ill advised pickup rout, and refinishing in cherry red. Oh…. and removing Ted Nugent’s signature.
Someone decided it would be nice to rout and install for a telecaster bridge pickup.
In this shot I am working on the rout repair but you can see where the the bridge angle was reduced to accommodate a more modern lightning bolt bridge. I moved it back to the original location and patched the hole.
The frets on this Mustang were in terrible condition. They were extremely rough, uneven, and had been filed to their limit. The fretboard had been lacquered and there had been some filing in between the frets leaving the surface scarred, ugly and with a flatter radius in the lower positions. The fretboards on these Mustangs are very thin so leveling the board and removing the finish had to be done with extreme care.
Here is a repair or modification I see fairly often. In the 50′s and 60′s Gibson offered or used adjustable bridges on J-45s culminating in 1963 with the worst bridge design ever – a plastic bridge with adjustable saddle and a plywood bridge plate. The plastic bridges look and sound terrible.
Replacing the bridge involves removing the bridge plate and bridge, patching the extra holes from the mounting hardware, and installing a new maple bridge plate and rosewood bridge.
This Warwick Thumb bass had been previously defretted and the current owner wanted to have it refretted with Warwick brass frets. I has to order the frets from Germany but in a stroke of good fortune it turned out thy the slots were filled with a soft putty which could be removed with a fret slot cleaning scraper. It required a little fretboard leveling but the new frets went in without a hitch and it plays beautifully.
This poor Les Paul Deluxe suffered the rigors of the arid New Mexico climate. The maple cap was split and pulling away form the mahogany body in several places. The owner opted to replace the mini humbuckers with vintage P-90′s and have it refinished a Gold Top.
The frets were in need of being replaced and the binding nibs had already been removed so I took the opportunity to flatten the fretboard before replacing the frets. For more photos click here.
The celluloid bobbin from this ES-300 style pickup from a 1940 Gibson EH-150 was brittle, cracked, and disintegrating in places, the windings were broken, and the magnets were missing. There was really no choice but to completely reconstruct the pickup but it provided an opportunity to look inside a rare pickup. The construction is very similar to a P-90 but with a toothed metal core that extends up through the coil. I was not able to find much information about this pickup so I had to go intuition.
I replaced all of the celluloid, except the wraparound covering that was still in good condition, rewound (42 PE wire, 8750 turns, 9.3K ohms), and added a pair of cast Alnico magnets. I used Alnico 5 because I had them on hand but these could easily be replaced with Alnico 3 which I am sure it had originally. For more picture click here.
I recently purchased a Dewalt compact router for doing less intense routing jobs. It is relatively light weight and smaller in size but still very powerful, ideal for routing curved truss rod channels.
I made a base for the router with adjustable rails that ride along curved runners clamped to the neck blank. Material is removed in several passes until desired depth is reached. More pics here.
It certainly isn't uncommon to see crazy repairs and modifications come through the shop. I often find myself scratching my head trying to figure out just how some of these seemed reasonable to anybody. I hope this person was stranded in an isolated location and only had one set of replacement tuners but they were probably just too lazy to go find the correct replacements. Of course they couldn't be too lazy if they chiseled out all that wood with a dull tool!
This Gibson Marauder has been put through it's paces. It has been heavily modified and taken a few hard hits. The owner wanted it cleaned up a bit but to retain the original finish on the fretboard and headstock.
After stripping it down I replaced the missing wood, filled the former tailpiece holes and refinished the body and the back of the neck. With new frets and a custom pickguard it is ready for action again.
Binding repair can be challenging, often requiring finish touchup and tedious leveling. This Airline guitar had the extra challenge of installing the binding under the frets which were installed through the binding. With a little careful measuring I was able to saw the fret slots and file the binding back to fit snugly under the fret ends and then level the rest to the fretboard. A little finish touch up and amber aging completed the job.
Old Gretsch guitars are notorious for having binding problems. This great 1957 Chet Atkins has largely escaped the binding rot that often seen on these old guitars but the neck binding had shrunken and worked loose. I had to replace 2 small sections that were missing but most of the old binding went back into place without any problems. I used a trick I learned from Dan Erlewine to recreate the red fret markers – colored pencil lead. For more photo click here.
This cool old Kay archtop came in with high action and no room left under the adjustable bridge but with the neck reset it plays beautifully. I love the 'Kelvinator' headstock and the Kleenex Box Pickups! For more photos click here.
