Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Now, more dirty pictures …


GUITARISTS are advised: This is the place for sick guitar pictures. Today I can unveil the second most disgusting repair job I have seen.
The guitar cost $5 at a garage sale.
The vendor said he had planned to put a clock in it after he acquired it from the former owner who drilled 10mm holes through the fretboard and used coachbolts to hold the neck to the body.
The former user must also be scarred for life from punctures on his abdomen from the bolt-ends and nuts protruding from the guitar back.
The headstock still carries a brand, Status Silhouette. It must have been a pretty low-range strat copy. Google had one specific reference.
http://reviews.harmony-central.com/reviews/Guitar/product/Status/Silhouette+Series/10/1
The Status failed to impress that reviewer but someone has loved this guitar before a mysterious mental illness caused them to attack it with a drill.

THE frets show a fair bit of wear and the finish has worn off the neck back.
The guitar certainly has been played at lot by someone who used much of the fretboard, not just one or two positions, which seems most common in fret wear.
A transfer of a near-naked girl is another reflection of the player’s love for the guitar.
No reason for the unusual fixing method is apparent. If the four screws through the standard backplate simply loosened up and lost their grip on the timber, as sometimes happens, the only remedial action should have been to plug the old holes with splinters and glue, redrill holes of the correct size and replace the existing set-up.
Yet this master luthier from Bizarro has removed two frets, drilled huge holes through the fretboard, screwed the nuts on from the back, then replaced the frets in a bath of superglue, leaving four cavernous holes.

NOTHING is easy. When I tried to dismantle the neck to allow me to plug the holes with dowel, I found the superglue had set around the screwheads. So I chipped away at them with a high-speed handtool until they freed up.
The neck and maybe the pick-ups will go on a nice semi-acoustic body I picked up a few years ago from a luthier’s moving sale. I’ve been keeping one eye open for a cheap neck for years but making this match work will be difficult.
I’ll introduce the combo in a new post soon.

No comments: