Ian - Any repairman, ANY REPAIRMAN - lives on setups, new nuts, and fret levels. If you can't do that, forget it. Focus on the neck, get good at it, and you will always have work. That's my meat and potatos, and the source of my worldwide acclaim.

Ian - Any repairman, ANY REPAIRMAN - lives on setups, new nuts, and fret levels. If you can't do that, forget it. Focus on the neck, get good at it, and you will always have work. That's my meat and potatos, and the source of my worldwide acclaim.

Ian, you have just heard from three of the true professionals on this forum and their advice is spot on. I'll give a slightly different perspective. I am NOT a professional but I have been doing repairs for four or five years now for a local brick and mortar music store. I tend to do lots of repairs that Hesh and Chris and David might not want to take on - the poor little cheap broken things that might not justify the work a pro would charge for. I'm honest with my customers and usually they are pretty happy with what I can do for them.

Some random thoughts.

Setups will be your bread and butter and learn to do them perfectly. Also learn to listen to your customer - what exactly does she want in a setup. A bluegrasser will want a completely different action from a fingerstylest from an electric shredder. Learn to evaluate everything on the guitar before you do anything - it makes absolutely no point to spend 2 hours adjusting the action on a guitar that is badly dehydrated. Learn how each part of the setup interacts with each other - honestly you will make a lot more saddles than nuts.

Learn to do perfect fretwork - both dressing existing frets and replacing them. In my humble opinion you can't do a good setup with bad frets.

I reglue a fair number of loose bridges and fix way too many broken headstocks. I fix a lot of cracks, and I install lots and lots of pickups. I rarely do really invasive work like resetting neck (I send them to the pros) and I make it a point not to do finish repairs. I'm smart enough to turn down anything that I'm not comfortable with, but I try to have an option for my customer.

There are many good references for the work you are going to do but this sits on my workbench all the time

http://www.stewmac.com/How-To/Books/Gui ... Guide.html

As we have discussed in some other threads, I have developed a spreadsheet and a systematic way to evaluate each guitar that helps me talk to the owner about what I think needs to be done. Many of the pros can bypass this, for me it is time well spent.

So, should a repair person simply go with what they prefer in a setup when the customer is unable or uninterested in communicating their own preferences?

So, should a repair person simply go with what they prefer in a setup when the customer is unable or uninterested in communicating their own preferences?

Actually I handle parts in three different ways. I keep a small stash of strings, saddle and nut blanks, things like that that I buy in bulk and get a good price. I mark those up to whatever list would be.

If a part comes from the music store that I contract with I simply install it. Ditto if my customer brings the part and asks for me to install it - an example might be the K&K pickup in the above example. I have kind of a funny attitude if someone brings a part that they purchased on the old internet if I know the store also stocks it - I tend to take a little longer to install it and round my time up instead of down. Same thing doing a setup for a guitar bought off the web if there is one hanging in the store. Or maybe a better way to say that is for customers of the music store I tend to round down.

Third kind of part is something I have to order - the tuners on the old Harmony for example. That is always discussed with the customer before I order and I do cover all my costs - shipping was ten bucks on the tuners, it was included in my bill.

I also don't expect my customers to pay for tools - for the tuners I happen to have three of the different sized peg head reamers (wouldn't it be nice if manufacturers standardized?). And after the first time I installed an end pin jack with a uni-bit I went out and bought the $80 reamer from StewMac. After installing 20 or more jacks with no issues at all I'm glad I made the investment.

Parts and strings, selling them has been problematic for us and continues to be so but we like what we did anyway.

We are not a music store so we have lots of strings because we use them in our work. We don't and won't BTW just restring a guitar. For us to get involved with a restring, which is a bit more then just restringing when we do do it, someone would have had to have us set-up their instrument prior.

Reason(s) being that every day hundreds if not thousands of people approach music stores asking for a restring when the instrument has other issues and client satisfaction will not happen. This sucks time and hurts relationships when something that needs a neck reset is ignorantly requested that it simply be restrung and then the client discovers..... that the action is sky high.

Lately we have been refusing to even sell our string stash at retail unless, again, someone is an established client of ours. For us to stop doing our billable hours for 2 cents of string profit makes no sense so we won't do it. Remember too that single string sales I have to pay a bookkeeper to enter it into QuickBooks and an accountant to pay the sales tax and do the annual return. With all of this in mind we simply decided to turn it all on for our clients and not get caught in the time suck for people who are not our clients.

Regarding parts we have everything expected of a repair facility, pots, bone, screws, pick guards, etc. etc. But we won't stock retail parts like tuners or even bass guitar strings because there are so very many choices and different scale lengths making the idea of universal bass strings impossible.

When someone has a need for a tuner replacement we tell them to source the tuners where ever they wish and either have them drop shipped to us or don't even come here until you have them in hand and then we will flip the instrument in one day or less.

It's freed up our working capital to not have to have an inventory of crap parts that can have no end in sight in terms of the expectations of retail clients.

For the strings that we do sell we mark them up 100% over what we have to pay for them and most people don't care because the alternative is to drive for miles to save a few bucks. Most people understand that we are a repair facility only and once we explain that they seem to understand why we don't want to stock retail items. This is again not attempting to be all things to all folks.

FYI when someone needs a single, broken string we often stop what we are doing and replace the string and call it no charge..... The duality of man....

A music store in Carrboro/Chapel Hill, NC had a good idea ~15 years ago and kept a vending machine stocked with sets of strings and picks on their front porch.