Martin’s
Guitar Repairs
Martin’s
Guitar Repairs
This was an interesting restoration. The owner was given the guitar by an uncle when he
was a teenager and he looked after it as teenagers do!
We discussed the repair options in detail with Brian. Everybody has a budget and
making sure we do the best things to make a guitar live again without taking away the
soul (or breaking the bank) is a process we like to talk through in a lot of detail with the
customer.
The Hofner had been a loft dweller for quite a
few years and the electrics had corroded
completely - the controls were jammed and
nothing came out of the jack socket at all so it
was only when we stripped the guitar down later
that we found that one of the pickups was
missing entirely (bit of a surprise that...) just an empty pickup shell! The top was heavily
chipped and pitted and the neck had been epoxy glued to the body in the past. The machine
heads were salvaged from another guitar, the pickguard was missing and there was a
mysterious veneer patch in front of the curious looking bridge. The action was ridiculous - the
neck was so bowed Robin Hood could have used it. The fingerboard was heavily corroded
and pitted and the frets were worn away.
Brian was determined to have the best possible job done and we decided that
some of the parts were beyond repair or inappropriate and would have to be
replaced with new. By the end, we had purchased two pickups, a pickguard and
bracket, machine heads, ebony bridge, control knobs and potentiometers. The
tailpiece was carefully restored - you only want to remove rust and discolouration,
not the plating!
To correct the bow in the neck (there was no truss rod in this vintage guitar) we
refretted the guitar with frets of
a slightly wider tang in an effort to ‘wedge’ the neck into a
new configuration. This was partially successful (you can
only do so much...) but improved the action a lot when we
fitted the new bridge.
The veneer patch was covering a slot cut in the top which had been cut to move
the bridge pickup towards the neck in the past. We did a bit of research and
decided to restore the position of the pickup close to the bridge. A spruce wedge
was glued into the slot and refinished. The colour match wasn’t quite as good as
we hoped as the plywood top was hungry for the stain we used to match the
colour.
We decided to leave the epoxy glued neck alone and concentrated on cleaning
and restoring the electronics. Luckily the resistors and
capacitors were still OK (once we’d cleaned off the gunk) and the
switches were serviced. The pots were corroded solid so these were
replaced with new and the whole assembly was rewired.
There was a crack down the back of the neck which was stabilised
and refinished and the whole guitar was thoroughly cleaned and
polished. The top was pretty unsightly though so after some
discussion we decided that the best solution was to drop fill all the
dings and nicks with stained lacquer which was then flatted and
polished. The result is that the guitar looks pretty good for her age.
We had to be very careful with the Hofner logo on the upper bout as
this was applied on top of the finish during manufacture.
So, down to reassembly. The pickups and electrics were refitted and
the new machine head racks put on The bridge was snugly fitted to
the body by taping abrasive to the body and carefully moving the
bridge to and fro to achieve a perfect junction between the feet of the
bridge and the top. And we’re ready to fit the strings - flatwounds
would have been the best retro option but we wanted to have as light
a gauge as possible to reduce stress on the neck for the best action so we elected for D’Addario
Half Rounds which are available as a set of 9-42. What a sweet voice this guitar has! A pro set up
finds all the high spots left in the frets and sets the intonation just right. The last act is to fit the
celluloid pickguard which involves making an accurate template, some very careful cutting and
hand polishing.
Brian was delighted with the results which has brought his old
friend back to life.
