Making a new bridge for a vintage Martin guitar

A common obstacle for any guitar tech is fixing bad work from a previous repair. Depending on the situation, working around unorthodox or hastily executed repair work can be the biggest challenge of the job – and sometimes that work is impossible to undo. In this article I’m going to explain why I resorted to …

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Relicing a vintage Fender bass neck

Vintage Fender musical instruments are getting more and more valuable, and considerably harder to find, all the time – in part because there’s a “cool factor” in a road-worn and battle-scarred guitar that you simply can’t find in a more recently manufactured counterpart. Modern urethane finishes don’t crack, chip or wear through the way the …

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Rebuilding a Shattered Headstock

When this National resonator guitar showed up at our shop the customer initially asked if we could replace the neck because the slotted headstock was destroyed in an accident. It had completely shattered and all of the splintered fragments were in a Ziplock bag ready to be thrown in the trash. We asked if we …

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Making a Gretsch pickguard from scratch

The materials used for making binding, tuner buttons, and pickguards on many vintage guitars weren’t the modern plastics that we know so well today – like the polyethylene water bottles and the ubiquitous yellow vinyl rubber ducks that will inhabit the Earth long after we’re gone. One of the common plastics used back then was …

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Acoustic bridge coming off: FIXED!

Acoustic guitars can be designed to sound good, or can be designed to last – it can’t really be both. Most builders try to find a middle ground, and many are very successful at finding a perfect balance. However, guitars are mostly made of wood, and sometimes wood just won’t cooperate. Occasionally we see this …

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Installing a Kahler into a PRS

We rarely see Kahler equipped guitars in our shop – I don’t remember seeing any at all in the last seven years. Yet over the last two months we’ve seen at least five (three of which we removed and returned the guitar to stock, like so: http://www.strangeguitarworks.com/filling-a-kahler-route/). A few weeks back our friend Gregg asked …

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Enter the PLEK

The day has finally arrived: we got a Plek machine. As many of you are aware, we always strive for perfection, and invest in tools of the highest quality to ensure that your guitar will be the best it can possibly be. Getting a Plek was the next logical step for us, and let me …

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Filling a Kahler route

There are two types of guitar players out there: those who use tremolo – (which is actually technically vibrato, not tremolo), and those who don’t. Sometimes permanent modifications are made to guitars to outfit them with a whammy bar – and perhaps those decisions are regretted later. A common mod for Gibson guitars is installing …

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Fixing a broken Gibson truss rod on a vintage Grabber

We repair quite a few broken truss rods here at Strange Guitarworks, and oftentimes it’s not a simple endeavor. Every repair is unique, which is one of the reasons we love our jobs: it’s never boring. Fixing this broken Gibson truss rod in this vintage Grabber was a doozy: the headstock was broken off, the …

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Repairing a Broken Taylor Neck

As an authorized Taylor Guitars repair center we often get calls from Taylor owners about damaged guitars and other warranty issues, and we’re almost always able to help. Even if the repair isn’t covered by the manufacturer’s warranty we’re still able to purchase replacement parts for most current Taylor models. That option may be the …

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