Official Luthiers Forum!

I don`t think that the famous luthiers like Antonio de Torres, Hermann Hauser I., Conde Hermanos or even C.F. Martin I. have wasted one thought about serviceability!

Won’t speak about the first three, but the Martin line has definitely spent thought on serviceability, namely to make changes to avoid the need for it.

Again, I respect you and your repair work, but it is not my goal to make you your work as easy as I can. My goal is to build a guitar as good as I can which is an expression of mine.

Amen brother. As we learn new skills, we provide the opportunity for them to broaden their skills…;)

And although I used the word them, let’s not create an us and them mindset between builders and repairists. Luthiery is progressing and we all progress together by sharing our skills and insights. Modern build techniques will foster modernized repair techniques.

It’s wonderful.

No problem Ed if maintaining serviceability is not important to you you will not be the first to produce instruments with a short-sided view of the market and someone who does not see the need to provide real value to your clients. Real value to me AND many people means that the instrument will not have any engineering flaws that prohibit it from remaining in service over time with expected and common repairs.

My Honda goes in the shop this morning and I have to run to that appointment. I hit a pot hole. If Honda made my car so that the wheels could not be aligned it would not be very serviceable for a pretty much expected need and repair. If that was the case I would not have bought it and I would not recommend to others. That's what a lack of serviceability leads to.

Ovation comes to mind, unserviceable, perished in the marketplace when they once sold 1/3rd of all guitars in the United States.... An epic fail if you will.

If providing a serviceable instrument to the market is not someone's bag or desire they should not be selling guitars and if observations like mine and many others in the trade rub someone the wrong way maybe this is not a good endeavor for them.

Serviceability should always be on the mind of any builder unless as Rick Turner RIP once proclaimed, unless you are building "guitar like objects..." or what we referred to here as GLOs.

Hesh here in the third or first person will not back down, never from the point that we all should be building serviceable instruments using best practices from the industry and it should matter to us.

It's part of providing real value to our clients and our clients should always be very important to us.

Dennis I appreciated your reply and I also appreciated that you took criticism well. I do GET that you are also very keen to exercise your artistic expression and that puts your instruments in that category and that's great if that's your intent.

You should go to Healsburg there are a number excellent builders who build with the artist's eye pieces that are both art and instrument and I think you would enjoy the inspiration.

Juergen I'm happy that I make you laugh.

Edit: Please see my reply below.

One additional comment: Anyone who believes that serviceability is about making a repair person's life easier you're WAY off the mark.

Serviceability is all about value for your customer, remember them? It's not about me, Dan E., Frank Ford, Dave Collins, TJ Thompson, Bryan Galloup and dozens of other pro builders and pro repair people - serviceability is all about the customer ultimately and when we care about our customers we care about and support..... value.

Juergen I'm glad that I make you laugh. Hopefully you will never produce an instrument that makes anyone cry because it was not built to be serviceable.

So let's address your points:

Regarding museum pieces one of the best contributors to the OLF ever was a man from the UK named Colin Symonds. Colin was a university professor IIRC and a geologist. He built superb guitars that were always serviceable. So what's Colin got to do with a museum piece? Colin was a restoration luthier for one of the Royal museums in the UK.... He painstakingly took advantage of the serviceability of the instruments he was needing to restore and conserve only using period correct practices which, by the was were keen to be serviceable back then too.....


Regarding your love of my thoughts as a repair man I am and was a builder too and continue to advise many builders on a daily basis. Many of us are in contact now in Facebook, the ones I can stand that is.....

Regarding my guitar losing a bridge because my client is a professional, session musician and he got drunk and put in jail - how many guitars have you sold? Most of my 45 in the wild went to musicians who play out, the gigging people and my bridge lift is the only issue I am aware of for 45 instruments in service for nearly 20 years now. I'm proud of this.

You mention Antonio de Torres, Hermann Hauser I., Conde Hermanos or even C.F. Martin and make a false claim that none of us could ever make that they did not waste any thought on serviceability.

I can't know if they considered serviceability intentionally and neither can you but I can tell you that everyone of them did indeed build serviceable instruments and that's why some of them exist today. From the very glue that they used, hot hide glue which is perhaps the most serviceable of the glues to dovetail neck joints CF Martin I the dovetail neck joint is engineered to be released if desired. These people produced serviceable instruments and they also became the model for the rest of us in doing so.

You really missed the point here when you mentioned these Luthiers especially when CF's resulting company still to this very day produces some of the most serviceable instruments available.

And here's where you are wrong again and I'll have a suggestion for you in a minute.... It's not about making my life easy or easier. I make more money when you guys produce ****..... Why then would I care enough to hope to guide people into building better guitars?

Because I genuinely give a **** about the quality of work that invariably gets sold to the unsuspecting public that's why. We often, often in our work have to be the one to declare a.... woodworking project or a...... piece of art DOA to the owner and that breaks our hearts as well as the owner's. It's a crying shame some of the poor quality that we see and I keep most of it to myself. I have posted about a builder, well known, commands 8 - 10K for a guitar who located the bridge in the wrong position and it was off by 1/4".

Regarding art pieces.... Howard Klepper used to be an OLF member. He built Dovetail Madness and Son of Dovetail madness and both of these highly artistic expressions of the Lutherie art and trade were built to be as serviceable as possible. From the cylinder type top style to flying butresses employed inside his boxes Howards stuff was repairable and engineered to be repairable. He used HHG too, the most serviceable glue out here.

Lastly laugh all you want lots of folks come and go on this forum and the number of people who stick with it and actually are capable of making the change into becoming an industry professional is very small. The classified here are often a moment to those who came and went and no longer need their stuff.

For folks like you who are new to Lutherie and do not yet understand that this is not your world, yet... it's mine and people like me who work in the trade please respect us. We tend to be a small, tightly knit community who although we don't always agree on everything obviously we do all tend to agree that not building for serviceability is one of the big things that separates the folks who make it this trade and the ones who don't and won't.

It's my sincere hope that if you wake up in the middle of the night thinking of me again that the thought crosses your mind that maybe ole Hesh here is right, dang it..... and serviceability is important. There is no better marketing than an old guitar that plays and sounds great and does not need a thing.

I'm here to help and that includes you. Please don't be disrespectful of repair Luthiers some of us are also some of the finest builders on the planet with TJ Thompson coming to mind, Rick Turner RIP, Bryan Galloup and many, many more.

If you want to contact me privately feel free to do so but be advised I do push back hard if someone is an a** with me.

Thanks

Hesh, I think that we are nearer than you might think! This is something you wrote in November 2013: "A couple of weeks ago I hung number 52 on the wall and someone decided to take it home a few days later. I still won't build a commission in that I still believe that I simply could not stand to spend 150 hours looking at someone else's idea of a guitar and prefer to build what I like and am interested in. So I build them on occasion when I have time and then hang them and then off they go. Some will, some won't, so what... next. Back in the day on this forum we agonized over things such as minimal glue lines but rarely discussed the user interface - playability or that all too subjective but hugely important goal - TONE..."
This is exact what I am doing! Guitars are an expression of art but for all an expression of myself!

Dear Hesh, I`m sorry that you think that I am disrespectful to all the mentioned repair people and especialy to you. I promise I am not! Contrary I have the greatest respect for your and their work. I know that here in Germany nearly every Master of Lutherie makes his living with repairs.

Perhaps I misunderstand what serviceability means? Perhaps you can explain that for a dummy like me?

For I want to be able to correct for surely happening mistakes I only use HHG, so everything can be disassembled.

Again, I didn´t want to offend you under any circumstances!

Dear Hesh,
by the way: I am a 67 year old german, and that means english is a foreign language to me! Therefore it may happen that I do not use the right words for what I want to say. Try to answer me in german and you will immedeatly understand what I mean.
on the other hand: if I want to misunderstand another person, of course I will, and the other person has no chance!
Please be patient and good willing for me!

Juergen thank You for your words here I appreciate it very much.

Serviceability for guitars is building them with the idea in mind that they will need to be serviced in time. Neck angles will degrade, bridges will lift, nuts will need to be replaced and people will have accidents where cracks need repair and other repairs need to be made. Fret work will need maintenance and replacement in time, braces will give out and come loose, tuners will fail and need repair or replacement.

If you are building art pieces for a museum some fool with a political issue may throw red paint on your creation.....

So builders first will build in a manner that these tasks can be accomplished without undo effort or expense to the client. Repair Luthiers also have to be serviceable in how we, how I approach a repair. I may reset that neck now but it may need another reset in 15 years and that should be on my mind in my glue selection and how I rebuild the dovetail joint.

When I install a nut I make I it so it snap fits in the channel and as such only a small drop of medium CA is required as insurance to keep it in place. When this serviceable nut wears out it's serviceable in so much as I used quality bone that can be filled with dental fillings. The repair luthier 20 years from now will only need a slight "tonk" of a fretting hammer and the nut will break free of its glue drop with no damage to anything. Serviceability, that one little drop of CA was at one time a serviceable concept and I put it in practice.

I learned about the snap fit nut and one little drop of CA from a builder not a repair person by the way. Thanks again Mario P.

My frets and a builder's frets should not be installed in over widened slots... that will never take a fret without glue again and the glue I use should not prevent a future refret either.

We fret after the board is installed so we can also shape the fret plane and what results is the frets need the most minimal material removal to be leveled and shaped. What's serviceable here is the full fret height is available to the client and under the frets the board is not messed up with a body hump where the neck joins the body. We milled that body hump out before we ever fretted.

All these things will make your creations worth more too. I like Suhr, Collings, Sawdowski as personal guitars in my collection. They are all built to be serviced and it makes them a joy to play, own and look forward to.

When I reglue a bridge the original builder hopefully used a glue that will release and not what we unaffectionately in the trade call AMG or Asian mystery glue that won't release.

I clear the finish under the bridge but not to the perimeter of the bridge so a future repair and my repair does.... not.... show and no one can tell that the bridge ever lifted. Customers really appreciate a pristine guitar even when it's been repaired.

Serviceability is present from the moment an instrument is started to be built hopefully and then all through it's life with all of us touching it never, never doing anything that shortens it's life or creates an imbalance on the cost of maintaining the instrument into the future and the value it provides.

We, builders and repair people are supposed to be all about creating and.... and preserving well into the future. It is a huge part of the challenge of being craftspersons.

When I was a new builder and there were others here like me now who will bring up serviceability over and over and over again I used to spend my lunch hours in the moldy humidifier room at a G*itar C*nter. I would check out the Martins, Gibsons, Taylors and Breedloves and imagined that I too one day could build as well as say Martin.

In time I recognized that this was NOT a tough goal if one has ability and really is driven to succeed. Funny thing in more time I became a certified Martin repair Luthier and I find a very good fit with my obsession for quality and the Martin company. We are on the same page, highest quality work for the price point in the product line and highest quality work repairing same when they need it.

No matter how well a guitar is built someone is going to break it. I've worked on guitars that have been shot by a shot gun, run over by a truck, stollen, burned, recovered, inherited, involved in a crime scene, and played by or owned by famous folks like Robben Ford's 58 Les Paul as one example. Robben is a hell of a nice guy by the way.

No one should ever think that the repair side or the building side is lesser than the other. But those of us in the trade will usually agree that there is FAR more to know and learn on the repair side. It's not making a model of a guitar more than once or over and over again, that's what turned me off to building after my 16th OM.... I think I built five different body styles back in the day.

If one follows the good advice on this forum mostly from in the past you will be exposed to concepts such as serviceably and doing the highest quality work imaginable that will serve you well. The OLF has always promoted a quality approach but lately, the last several years it's not seemingly as important and that is why more pros won't participate here and we all lose as a result.

Lastly this is just one forum most builders are not here participating and builders these days are very common. Ask John Hall how many kits he sells and he's just one source. Repair Luther's who make a run at a viable business and survive a decade or more are much harder to find. I'm not speaking of the guy who does a few repairs in his basement. I've speaking of people who successfully makes a decent living doing this AND who became the "trusted source" for many, many guitar players.

In all cases we should all want the same thing and that is real value for our clients.

I know you are interested in the artistic side of the instruments, great now build them to last AND be repaired if need be and they will beat a path to your door. You can offer a lifetime warranty as I did and not lose any sleep over it. I've never had a warranty claim, not a one. The bridge reglue was abuse and the client understood this when he sobered up...

So you can do as you wish and be as artistic as you wish. Just please go the distance to keep your stuff serviceable so that a client of yours does not end up with a tough economic choice when they become a client of mine.

Thanks

Thank you very much, Hesh, for your detailed description of serviceability! Now I can say, that my guitars will be serviceable in nearly every part you mentioned.

Thanks again Juergen you are not the first English as a second language person I've dealt with and I understand completely. Your English is very good by the way so you are doing great.

I speak Hebrew and some Spanish and I suck at both so I do understand.

Yay this is great and you won't regret it either AND you will have a better understanding of the trade as well.

Great to hear.

Thank You