Flea Market Find

So about 2 weeks ago I went to the flea market in Lowell with Lou and Cappetto. Towards the end of the day Lou spotted this beat up old 50's Harmony sub-brand parlor guitar. It had cracks everywhere and was filthy, but only 5 bucks, so I told Lou if he bought it, I'd fix it for him.

So here's a pic of the body after i took off the rusty old strings and gave it a quick wipe with some pledge:


So the first thing I did was take off the tailpiece and tuners and take a wire brush to them to get off all the rust and grime. I tried to get a picture, but it just wasn't working out for me. They came out pretty well though.

There was one tuning post missing from the set. Luckily I have a box of mismatched half sets of tuners from other broken guitars I've bought in the past and found one that fit the set and put it on.

As far as cracks....There was a crack straight through the neck heel, and a split on the side that ran about 18 inches on the bass side.




I had read some stuff about harmonys on frets.com and decided to just pull the neck off and reset it. This was kinda a pain in the ass, but I'll need to learn it someday right?

So I laid down some potholders on the top and let an iron sit on the end of the fretboard for a little while to loosen up the glue, and pryed it up with a putty knife. I completely forgot to take pics of this part, kinda pissed now...

After that I used a modified wallpaper steamer to get into the neck joint and pop it out. Once I got it off, i pretty much glued the cracked piece of heel back on, then glued the neck back in right away. (note: this pic was taken before the glue was applied, I was making sure it fit back in place correctly before gluing it)


I let that sit overnight, and then went to work on that nasty side split.


I stuck some screwdrivers in there so I had enough room to apply glue. Poured some titebond into a dixie cup, and brushed as much as I could cleanly get into the crack with small watercolor paintbrushes. After that, I pretty much used every ratchet clamp I have. (note to self...buy more clamps...)


So once that dried, I used an expired guitar center gift card to scrape away all the thin residue that had squeezed out of the crack while clamped. I then sanded the whole edge that was repaired going 220, 320, 400, 600, 1000. Did the same with the repaired neck area. To finish up and cover the areas that had been sanded, I dipped a sponge in some dark walnut wood stain and smeared it across the scratch marks until it was mostly gone. Put a lite spray of poly over it, and then i was done.

Last step was reattaching the hardware. I used some double sided photo tape to stick the bridge on. Its not sticky enough to damage the top, but sticky enough to keep it in place. One bad part was that one of the tailpiece screws had stripped out while removing it, so I just used heavier screws in the two remaining holes that should get the job done.

So here it is finished:





All in all, I don't think I did too bad of a job. The neck did kinda get stained from the iron, but hey, it was a five dollar guitar and I fixed it for free, so I don't think Lou will be too upset. I'm just happy I documented as much as I could since I forgot to do this with my washburn, which I steam bent a piece of mahogany to replace a 4x6" section of the side.

I suck at keeping up with this

Mainly due to my lack of driving priveleges, I haven't been able to get much done lately. I still haven't gotten my neck from school, so I can't finish that. Been working a bit on the fine tuning of the body carving, but lately haven't been too motivated since I can't get into any classes now, so why bother moving fast. anyways, here's a few updated pics, i'll add more later. Sorry for the quality, my mom was out of town and took the camera when i did the inlays, so i had to use my cell phone.

New toy

Yeah, its been awhile again. Going back to finish the archtop in 2 weeks, been working on restoring a couple guitars for a friend, and bought an archtop acoustic on ebay last week i'm gonna restore. Picked this up earlier, drill press and sanding drums....

Found a pre inlay pic of the headstock

this was after I glued on my paduak veneer and cut out the shape on my bandsaw.

Been busy

I've been working on the inlaying proccess as well as carving the body more. I'll get the picks of the neck and headstock up later. I think they're on the other camera. Here's some pics from tonight of the body. If you're wondering why its taking me so long, in this first pic, you'll notice a very tiny little planer. Thats what i'm doing the majority of the carving with, and some with small rasps and wood files. So yeah, this labor of love is all being done by hand, no routers, no grinders, sanding discs, etc... Also I took some close up pics so you can see the subtle curve i'm trying to achieve sloping up to the top of the arch.



I'll post the neck pics later when I find em.

Neck carving

So I decided to take a break from carving the body, the planes were killin my hands, and I decided since there was still 2.5 hours left to work on the neck. I'll just post all the pics of the progress since I've already detailed before how I do it.

Carving the top

So sunday I actually got there on time. First thing to do was flush rout the body since the cap was cut out slightly larger.

Now that i look at it, that was the before picture, and there was no after between here and the next step. So after flush routing, the cap got routed down to where the body bindings will sit as a referrence point for the top carving.

After that, I got to carving. Ian had let me use his palm planes so it would go a little faster. Mine is only like 18mm I think, he's got one 2-3x that size. Aftermaking progress around the edge, I used rasps and sanding dowels to smooth it out before starting again. I'll just put up all the pics of the progress in action now.


I'll just post those to keep this less graphic heavy. I'll post the neck pics in a different post in a minute.