Official Luthiers Forum!

Glad it all worked out! Too bad you are so far away. I just received some TN made product to try out for "French polishing". It's not beer, but if you can stand it it'll get the job done.

glad it all ended well. i myself had a guitar for a quick fix (bridge gluing) and found that the guitar has quite a dent in the back - which i´m almost sure i was not responsible for, but sometimes my 4 year old does visit my shop... the customer left the guitar there over a month ago and hasn´t come to pick it up yet... fingers crossed.

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member of the guild of professional dilettantes

I recognize that jar. You can sip while you polish

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

well you can try! That's a bit stronger than normal. I made sure to get it made real strong and not cut. I believe that jar is about 190 proof. It'll make a good Tennessee polish

Congratulations! Nothing like a full day of sweating to keep you on your toes!

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

I have a good "breaking something" story for ya.I maintain a property for a wealthy woman.
She has museum quality pieces in her house.
I was checking an alarm sensor on a window,
where there was a 4 foot statue in front of it.
I barely grazed the hand, and noticed a crack at the wrist.
I said to meself "did I do that?"
I pushed the hand to try closing the crack,
it fell off!
It was made of wood, and had a cloth and plaster finish.
The hand had a joint at the wrist,
and powder post beetles had eaten the wood inside the hand.
I told her about it,
and she said the statue was 400 years old.
She was okay with it.
It really wasn't my fault.
Sorry to bore you with a non git story!

+1 ... Glad it all went well.

Did the new bridge changed the sound? What wood did you use? What did the new one weigh compared to the old?

Thanks,

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EddieLee

I can't say if it changed the sound since the stings that were installed when I got the guitar were old and rusty. I plan to get back in touch with my customer in a few days to know what he thinks.

Regarding weight, the old bridge weighted 28g, while the new one I made was 21(ish). Both were made of indian rosewood.

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Alain Moisan
Former full time builder of Acoustics, Classicals and Flamencos.
(Now building just for fun!)

Hi all,

Just want to give an update on this thread as things moved in the wrong direction and I think many could benefit from the lesson I learned.

Although the customer don't seem (yet) to blame the cracked neck on me, he is pretty pissed as I write this. It seems that between the time I installed the strings and checked the setup, and the time he tried it (which was 36 hours after I finished), the neck moved quite a bit. So the 1st strings can't play a sound when fretting between the 10 to 14th. After thinking about it, it made sens to me since the neck cracked exactly were the trussrod nut was resting, which probably cancelled any torque the trussrod was puting on the neck. It took a couple of hours for the neck to bend under string tension. My mistake was to not realise that when I had the guitar with me.

So I tried explaining that to my customer, but he won't buy it. To him, the trussrod 'feels' tight enough, he doesn't see the reason why a neck would move so fast, if setting up a guitar is just putting back the strings, he could do this for himself without having to pay for it, etc, etc. After several emails (where I did lose a bit of my cool), after he rejected all my detailed explanations of the situation, I offered to refund him for the entire job, which I did.

So the lesson I learned is to never accept a job that I will not have a chance to review. Meaning that if he was from around town instead of Jamaica, he would have simply brought the guitar back to me and I would have solved the issue quite simply by redoing the setup (and by quite probably just tightening up the trussrod). Instead I'm stuck with an angry customer, and a smaller bank account.

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Alain Moisan
Former full time builder of Acoustics, Classicals and Flamencos.
(Now building just for fun!)

Alain, that sucks. I'm sorry to hear that.
I would hate for that to happen to me. Situations like this can stress me out big time. Even if I know I was not the cause of the problem, they pull at me anyway.
At least you found something positive to take away from it with regards to when to accept or reject work. Thanks for sharing. If I ever get a customer from Jamaica, I'll know to send him packing, LOL.

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Mike

The only thing nescessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.