Bar Refret on a Vintage Martin

You don’t see these everyday! A while back our buddy Mark brought us his vintage Martin 0-18K (koa) for a refret, which is usually a very run-of-the-mill job for us here – except for one thing. This instrument comes from a bygone era when C.F. Martin guitars were made using bar frets. Bar frets differ …

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The case against Fender’s Micro-Tilt

Today, I’m going after one of my least favorite features on the world’s most popular guitar: I’m making a case against Fender’s Micro-Tilt. Fender introduced the Micro-Tilt in the early 70’s, and this has been causing problems with their necks for over 50 years. This was designed to angle a bolt-on neck back in the …

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Fretting a fretless bass

I’m a fretless guy. My first foray into fretless bass was back in 2001, when I yanked the frets out of the carbon-fiber neck on my Peavey B-Quad4. Over the years I’ve rarely owned a fretted bass, and have gone deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of fretless playing – so much now that …

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Repairing a Floyd Rose route

Woodworking can be a tedious process that requires patience, preparation and precision to execute well. Oftentimes we see examples of someone taking a more, uh… expeditious route. Like this guitar: someone attempted to modify this Floyd Rose cavity to fit a different style bridge that it wasn’t designed for, with less than stellar results. Maybe …

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PLEKing a multiscale guitar

If you had asked us a year ago if a multiscale guitar could be PLEKed, we would have said “Not yet!” The PLEK machine was designed for parallel frets, and for many years doing a PLEK job on a multiscale (or fanned fret) instrument simply wasn’t possible. But the good people at PLEK are always …

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Gibson frets in the wrong place – FIXED!

“Intonation is a social construct”. I’m not sure if I coined this phrase or inadvertently appropriated it, but I do say it often. All music is out of tune – it’s a mathematical impossibility for any three notes to be perfectly in tune with each other at the same time. That’s just science. We all …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/gibson-frets-in-the-wrong-place-fixed/

Bo Diddley-Inspired Custom Guitar!

Recently, our pal Mike Keller came into the shop with an interesting object accompanied by an interesting request. The object in question was a solid rectangular slab of blue molded epoxy with a fragment of wood suspended within, like an ancient mosquito in amber. He told us the wood was a Native American artifact – …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/bo-diddley-inspired-custom-guitar/

Pinning a floating bridge

If you’ve ever owned hollow-body jazz guitar with a floating bridge, you know the perils of changing the strings without accidentally moving the bridge placement. Even scarier, the bridge is also able to slide around the top of the guitar under full string tension if bumped, potentially throwing off your string alignment and intonation, causing …

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Ten years!

Ten years ago I was fired for the first time in my life. I was blindsided, in complete and utter shock, and I suddenly found myself unemployed and quickly going broke in San Francisco. I had been becoming increasingly disillusioned with San Francisco, and had been yearning to move back to the city that most …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/ten-years/

Output Jack Repair on a Gibson Thunderbird

When you play a Gibson Thunderbird on stage the way it’s supposed to be played, you’re probably going to break it at some point – and that’s okay! That means you’re doing it right and rocking out. This particular bass had the instrument cable stepped on during a gig (always loop your cable around your …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/output-jack-repair-on-a-gibson-thunderbird/

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