Archived from the Tools In Action forum (Woodworking). This thread is read-only.
Damage is small but involves:
1) replacing plastic binding on guitar neck
2) filling in chipped out wooden section with East Indian rosewood wood putty which I may have to make
3) refinishing part of wood guitar neck to match the yellowed binding on this old guitar
Thoughts? (I only do heavy construction and don’t usually deal with woodworking on the micro level.
The experienced guitar builders/repairers say it’s easy and I should replace all the binding on the one side of the neck and the remove all the frets and simply put in new frets.
But I am only a carpenter working towards being a contractor, not a professional luthier which is the most specialized woodworker I can imagjne possible.
Simply refret the whole guitar because of a chip on the binding on the guitar neck and a chip of rosewood broken off of it? Lol!
Looks like a sweet guitar. I had a Fender Stat sunburst back in the day.
Strats are great durable beasts.
My main guitar is the simple made in Mexico Classic 50’s strat. I also have a cheap Ibanez Artcire AS73 hollow body for jazz orchestra class but I was terrible at sight reading, lol.
Here’s the three with my friend’s unreachably expensive handmade J.W. Van one of a kind 24.75” scale sunburst strat with David Gilmour type EMG setup but wired the way my friend likes it.
But my guitars are always around $500 give or take a couple of hundred and a similar JW Van would be $3,000. I couldn’t ever afford one.
If I had three grand, I would get tools beyond the five grand I spent already for building houses, so let’s see within the three grand range;
1) Makita corded handheld planer $200
2) DeWalt 20/60v. Flexvolt joist drill $300
3) Mikwaukee large SDS Max rotary hammer $400
…those are necessary but also:
Dewalt thickness planer $700
Makita beam saw for outdoors $900
…and various lighter weight hand tools like titanium stuff for a few hundred
Nice tool list. Those guitars are sweet. I wish I never sold mine. Just looking at them brings memories back and would like to start playing again.
I found my old Yamaha guitar in the garage and gave it to my 15 year old. I need to reverse the bridge again, since I set it up to play left handed years ago. Frankly, I always sucked at playing, learning some Nirvana back in the ’90s but mostly just abusing my guitars. In my angst-ridden teenage years I smashed one of my guitars against my Chevette. Speaking of guitars and cars, that same guitar was the one I picked up at the age of 14. I drove my dad’s ’78 Bill Blass edition Lincoln Mark V 25 miles to the music store, backed into someone as I was leaving, and damned near ran out of gas as I hit some back roads in a state of panic. Naturally, I didn’t have my license, and I was worried someone would hit the payphone and call the police. I had a few dollars left over and gas was only about $0.75/gallon back then, so I was good, though I wonder how I was able to pay for the gas without being questioned as to why such a young man was driving a big luxury car.