And now for something completely different

Buco · March 13

Paul, I now see that removing a large amount of the original wood (basically getting rid of the broken wood totally) and replacing it with strong and fairly large plugs is probably necessary unless you want repeated failures. Repair that the previous did it's pretty much the same type of repair that Ted is doing in his repairs only with a lot smaller plugs. OK I'm convinced, if you want it fixed permanently that's what you gotta do. To hell will subtlety, go with certainty.

Also I wanted to say making a Selmer style neck as a one piece (if that's what no splice means) would probably waste enough wood for a whole another neck, given the angle of the headstock.

ethanwm · March 13

Someone (poorly) carved their name, bad bad! One of the handful of finish issues Martin took care of. A real pro.

Buco · March 13

That literally looked like a 4 year old child went to town. Glad you sent back to Martin.

Paul, I'll be honest, there's this psychology that I've seen over and over again when I was doing AV installs. One tech looking at the job someone else from a different company did and immediately go "oh, this is terrible". Especially if the customer is present. I'm not saying that's where you were coming from, you convinced me that the repair you did was a necessary step. But I wouldn't be surprised if some other repair person or a luthier looked at your job and said "no no no, this is all wrong, how could you..." I may have been similar at some point but over the years I learned to always give a benefit of doubt, at least for a moment. Even the guy in the CF repair video said the previous repair was dumb. I'd say the person had the right idea but it was insufficient.

paulmcevoy75 · March 13

I mean, I am critical of my own work.

But if I repaired it 2x, making it worse each time and then someone else had to obliterate my repair to fix my work and they wanted to criticize it, that would be totally reasonable to me.

I recently had damage to a guitar I made in shipping. It absolutely sucked. Something was dropped on the box during shipping but the break exposed a weak point in my design. So I'm redesigning the whole way I make a neck. In normal use the guitars I've made are great and you shouldn't drop heavy weights on guitars right around the neck joint. But it does show me a weakness that I want to fix.

Do you want me to elucidate how many bad ideas were in that repair?

I mean ultimately the proof is in the pudding. It broke twice.

paulmcevoy75 · March 13

Just one of many issues, he replaced the mahoganish stuff (not a very strong wood) with spruce (in this orientation both weak and soft).

But as I said my intent was just to talk about neck breaks. The repair is very bad. I was not trying to badmouth someone. It's badly done repair but mostly me bringing it up was that one piece necks can break there moreso than scarfed necks. ,

Buco · March 13

I agree that you need to look at making and repairing things with the worse case scenario and "what if" in mind. With so, so many Gibson headstocks breaking, isn't it time they changed things?

It sounds like your guitar suffered a similar damage like the first one I received. When I opened the box, (which was so well padded and wrapped that I thought was nuts as I was opening it) I found the heel joint completely severed off and splinters all over. Then I remembered the FedEx guy being in an unusual hurry to hand me the box and leave. I couldn't detect any damage to the packaging, which is a testament to how well it was done, but something very heavy must've dropped right at the spot and caused the wood joint to explode.

paulmcevoy75 · March 13

No one seems to know why Gibson keeps doing what they're doing. They seem to be a dumpster fire of a company and have been off and on for a while.

The rumor is that that's the way Gibson has done it forever and people want Gibsons that look like old Gibsons. Obviously I find that strange. I think guitars should evolve over time and get better. I think old guitars are super cool but I feel confident that I can build something better than an old guitar and that the person who comes after me can build one better than I can. I don't feel any obligation to keep making something in a way that feels inferior.

I think the Gibson headstock is at a greater angle than most, that makes it worse. But that Dimauro was at a pretty shallow angle and it still snapped....

Btw as far as wasting wood, when people cut 1 piece necks, they usually cut them from a 3" thick big wide board. They cut them out in parallel so they get maybe 12 blanks out of a 13" wide piece of wood. So it's not hugely wasteful. A lot of work that I don't want to do though.

paulmcevoy75 · March 19

Hello all

I made a little video about how I'm pressing the arch into the tops of my guitars and how I adapted it from the Selmer Pliage.

To be totally clear, many great guitars (including, obviously, the Selmers) were built with the pliage (very obviously) and I'm not suggesting that this is "better". It's just what I thought might make sense and how I came up with it.

https://youtu.be/18gz0yAo8CY