Wrestling with a guitar neck

ANGRY curses echoed around my home workshop when the neck of a rare guitar refused to part with the body.
The wrestling match began after my commitment to make minor improvements to a rare and "trashy" 1960s solid body guitar.
You are reading history here because documentation of the ColTone brand is rare, even on the huge network of the internet (see last post).
The neck was so thick, with a sharp angular profile instead of comfortably rounded, that it was too awkward and left-hand challenging to ever give me any joy.
The options were to keep it as a display piece and leave it silent, or to ‘have a go’ at making it play better.
This meant the resolve to reshape the neck and tilt it back slightly to give better clearance of the pickups.

UNUSUAL aspects of the ColTone include the pickups floating on rubber bases that slot into the rebates on the body.
A lack of up-and-down adjustment meant the pickup at the neck was too close to the strings to allow right-hand freedom.
When amateur luthier finally confronted intransigent neck the bout went like this:
Three of the four screws passing through the backplate and holding the neck broke virtually on the first hint of torque. The steel must have been good, back in the 60s, don’t you reckon?
Then, I tried to drill out the screws that still held the neck to the body and had some success, judging by the steel shavings, but each time the bit slipped and stared chewing out the wood.
Still, the neck would not budge, so I helped it with a chisel between the neck and body.
Three hits with the mallet showed the reason for stubbornness. When the neck came away, part of it split off and stayed behind on the body.

YOU guessed right. The makers had applied a fair dollop of glue. I now had another problem and tried to remove the shards to glue them back on place.
More hassles: they would not come off cleanly and most were useless.
The picture shows the back of the neck after stage-one of the remedial action to square it up and fill the screw holes.
The back of the neck, meanwhile, is feeling the cutting edge of a coarse sandpaper and I bring it back to a comfortable profile.
I could keep writing about this for quite a while but have come to the limit today.

AS the blog continues I will have stories not just about the rarer brands but about the big names like Gibson, Fender, Maton etc.
Thanks for joining me. I hope to be on this blog for quite a while. A Day in the Life of a Guitar is here to stay.