Guitar maker's notebook

Do you also do repairs?

I get that question a lot. People learn that I build guitars and are often fascinated with the various processes I use in creating my "art". While not every guitar enthusiast is looking for a new instrument, let alone a custom piece, many will have an issue with their current guitar -- it's hard to play, makes funny buzzes, the electrics no longer work, won't stay in tune, etc. Many guitar makers don't do repairs, except perhaps warranty work on their own instruments. Then again, many folks in the instrument repair business don't actually build themselves. I've done both side-by-side for the last 10 years.

I believe that repairing instruments helps me with my building. Almost every repair job that comes through the shop gets a set up for playability and many get at least some work on the frets. Virtually every major factory brand has done time on my bench, and that's helped me to critique my own work. Improving the playability of all those guitars has raised my level of skill and improved my own instruments.

Just a few of the guitars that have been across my bench:

Perhaps the most rewarding part of doing both building and repairs is the wide cross-section of customers I see. It's a fact that professional musicians are often not flush with cash, but their instruments are essential tools for their craft. No wonder that musicians often form an intimate bond with their instruments. To succeed as creative aritists, they need instruments that can respond. When a guitar is maladjusted or suffers damage, a musician cannot give a good performance. The repair may be as simple as a small neck adjustment or fixing a broken wire, or something more major like replacing worn-out frets -- they all have a huge impact on a musician's ability to perform.

Then of course there are young students of the instrument. I've had guitar teachers and parents of young kids bring in guitars with everything from lifting bridges to broken necks, asking if I can just make it playable again. The instrument may not be expensive and may not warrant extensive restoration. The object is simply to get the instrument back into the hands of the child so they can experience the joy of making music.

Often, the customer is simply an amateur enthusiast who plays after work, sometimes as a solo endeavour, or maybe sharing music together with friends. They may have a single guitar or an extensive collection. Invariably, they are attached to their instrument as a close friend and feel something very personal has been lost when it fails or simply no longer plays as it once did.

One such repair came through the shop last week. A gentlemen brought in a 30-year-old Gibson ES-335 that had suffered an accident. He's not a pro player and wasn't aware of the value of the classic instrument he's owned for many years. As you can see in the pics, the headstock had snapped and was held only by the face veneer. In one tragic moment, his treasured Gibson had become completely unplayable. "Will you have to use screws?", he enquired sadly. While I can't always make a repair completely invisible, the objective is always to do the best work possible and to return the instrument in good playable condition. "We'll try to avoid screws", I assured him.

The patient as presented:

This was not the first broken headstock I've tackled, but each one is a little different. On this guitar, I used the old luthier's standby, hot hide glue. Luthiers have relied on hide glue for centuries. It cures nice and hard, and can be "reactivated" with heat and moisture -- perfect for repairs. I introduced a liberal amount of glue into the break and clamped the headstock in padded cauls quickly before the glue cooled. The following day I removed the clamps and cleaned up the excess with hot water:

A little bit of touch up was done to the chipped finish before heading to the buffing wheel. The guitar was then reassembled and I went through my normal set up routine. I adjusted the neck relief, nut slots and string height, and gave the instrument a careful going over before telling the owner it was ready:

The real reward was seeing his reaction when he came to fetch the instrument. He left with a smile and I knew that guitar was going to get a good workout with the amp cranked up loud when he got home! The next day I received this note by email:

"Salut Tim

Je voulais juste de dire que je suis TRÈS satisfait avec le travail que tu as fait sur ma Gibson!

I really appreciated your action adjustment, input jack cleanup and the fact that the repair work on my broken neck is virtually impossible to detect! It's like a brand new ES-335!

mucho gracias...and I will see you next month with another guitar to fix!

DL"

Certainly I love building an instrument in collaboration with a guitar enthusiast, knowing that I can offer that person virtually anything they can imagine. But, do I also do repairs? With feedback like that, you bet!

 

Compensation calculator for steel-string guitars

This post is directed primarily at my lutherie brethren -- it's our culture as guitar makers to be generous with information and advice, so this is a bit of pay back for the tremendous help I've received from the community.

I'm currently building a fan-fret baritone guitar -- keep an eye out for further posts on that project as it progresses.  One of the challenges is to address a design issue that is not generally transferable from standard 6-string guitars -- that being: "where to locate the compensated saddle?"  While there are some online calculators for this purpose, those I found are not "transparent", so hard to know exactly how they work.  There is the added complication that the scale-length for each string on a fan-fret instrument is different.

I decided to create a spreadsheet for these calculations, based on the article by materials engineer Saajk Elmendorp (2010: American Lutherie 104: 56-60).  Elmendorp presented his calculations in metric units, but some of the string engineering data are readily available only in US units (e.g., D'Addario Strings).  Some fiddling was necessary, as well as some supplementary calculations of tension based on unit weight and tuned frequency. In the end, I declared input in metric or US, depending on what was most readily available to me -- you may wish to revise the sheet to your preferred input units.

I'm making the spreadsheet available for anyone who may find it useful.  The spreadsheet is available here: Download Steel string compensation calculator (you'll have to unzip the file once you've downloaded it to your computer). You simply replace the input data given in the yellow-highlighted cells, and the sheet will recalculate automatically.  The saddle compensation required for each string is given in the last column.

Of course I make no guarantees, so you will have to accept the risk if you use it for your own instrument design work. Happy to get feedback on the calculator, so let me know your experiences and suggestions. 

BTW: I notice that my post on my fret calculator has been corrupted by Typepad -- it seems they no longer like Excel files unless they are distributed as zip files.  I'll make an edit to that post so that it will be available again for download.

The "Curly Birch" classical guitar

It was time for something different, this time inspired by a piece of wood given to me by a forestry colleague in southern Sweden.  Curly birch (Betula pendula var. carelica) is a cultivar of silver birch found in western Europe.  My friend has this species growing on his property and uses it for the pens that he turns on his small lathe. The wood has lots of bark inclusions that give it a spectacular figure.  I decided it would be the centre of attention on a contemporary themed classical guitar. I dubbed the instrument "Curly Birch".

What do I mean by "contemporary"? Classical guitars have many design features that are very traditional. Some are more or less aesthetic, such as headstock shape, rosette patterns and bridge design, but other features affect playability, such as a slightly slimmer neck with a radius on the fingerboard and inlaid side makers. I made non-traditional changes in all these areas, but the all-important "box" and bracing are fashioned closely after a well-known guitar made by José Ramirez in 1966, similar to instruments used by Segovia and Parkening.

The spectacular figure of the curly birch wood was featured in the rosette and on the "tie block".  The top and bracing of the guitar are Sitka spruce.  The back, sides, bridge, binding and headplate are Indian rosewood.  The neck is mahogany and the bound fingerboard is ebony.  While there is extensive purfling, it consists of a single line of maple against the darker woods. Shell inlay is MOP, used on the headstock and for the fingerboard side makers.  The finish is lacquer.

I finished the guitar in late 2014, while we were still in Nairobi.  The sale hit a snag with the customer's cash flow, so the guitar was transported in the shipping container with the rest of our personal effects.  A couple of months ago I sent the guitar to Toronto for evaluation by some professional players.  I was delighted, not only to get some great feedback, but also to see the guitar recorded.  I took one of the tracks and used it as background to a slideshow-style video that illustrates some of the processes I used in building the instrument.  Andy McKee gave us permission to use his piece "Dream Catcher" and Jeff Biggar performed it on "Curly Birch".  My nephew Andrew Mullin produced the audio track.  Many thanks to Andy, Jeff and Andrew.

Enjoy!

 

Now established and operating in Canada!

It's taken a while to get set up.  First there was the 4-months at sea for all of our stuff after leaving Nairobi, making its way slowly to the port of Montreal.  Then of course we had to find somewhere to live.  That turned out to be easier than expected.  We found a nice place on Mont Shefford, less than an hour's drive east of Montreal.  The property is high on the mountain, surrounded by sugar maple and red oak, with a view south toward the US border -- on a clear day we can see two ski hills in Quebec and one in Vermont.

Even before our shipping container arrived, we were busy with the typical must-do improvements around a new house purchase.  Still, we took time to gather some maple sap and prepare some maple syrup -- now we know we're back in Canada! The container itself was unloaded on Easter weekend, when of course it snowed!

 

Just when we should be unpacking and setting up the workshop, I went in for surgery -- a total shoulder replacement.  It's been a huge improvement, but did slow everything down.  With the green leaves of summer, the house received a number of renovations, including a balustrade to guard against the 4-meter drop off the lower deck down the mountain! 

The lower floor of the house has a garage, now equipped with compressor for spray finishing, a mechanical room for storage, and of course the workshop.  The shop area had been originally designed as a family room with a walkout on to the back deck.  Renovations weren’t extensive, but did involve a little bit of everything: demolition, framing, drywall, new doors, new lighting and new electrical circuits (2 x 240V and 2 x 120V), paint, and finish carpentry.  It’s only been this past week that everything could be put in final position and cabinets loaded.  There are a few additional things planned, like a more efficient dust-control system, but things are now at least useable.

Where’s the wood?  All of my instrument wood is stored in the mechanical room that has been equipped with a humidity control system that maintains a constant 42% RH.  My assembly bench for critical glue-ups, such as braces, is also in the same area so I never have to worry about the air being too wet or too dry during assembly.

So, the shop is now in operation – you see a guitar on the bench for some minor repair (on the workbench), and the neck for my next project underway (on the table saw).  Feels good to be back in the business of making sawdust and guitars!