Beware, mouse can bite

Now, the promised yarn about the guitar I couldn’t give away. This comes with a warning to use your mouse in the correct manner with the wrist elevated and not pivoting on the desktop. Before you read this you may like to see two background posts (No1, No2).

MOUSEBITE gave me hell in the mid-90s. The newspaper group where I worked as an editor and page designer had updated its computers.
We had moved to big Macs for the layout. After working mainly on mouse-less publishing systems for decades I was now clicking intensively.
The habit of resting the heel of my right hand on the desk and pivoting while using the mouse created a little callus.
After a year or so, the impact point had a slight redness and gave an occasional painful twinge.
I would joke about the little "mousebite" but about six months later the inflammation suddenly spread into the wrist and the twinges became bursts of head-splitting pain.
The doctor advised me to wear a wrist brace, which limited my guitar playing and slowed me down a lot at work.
THINGS were pretty bleak as I struggled through each day at work, with every slight wrist movement causing intense pain.
After about three months, I feared the injury would ‘take me out’ from my career in journalism and I could hardly play guitar at all.
We moved into a new house that needed some cleaning up around the yard but the mousebite now stopped any sudden or loadbearing movements.
Painkillers helped me get through work but I couldn’t play the guitar.
DEPRESSION was the likely cause of a lapse of judgment with my old Eko guitar.
A workmate in his early twenties asked me if I could recommend a guitar brand. He wanted to learn to play.
I said I had a great guitar that he could have. "Just help me move a few logs around my new property, maybe two hours work, and the guitar is yours," I said.
A few days later I asked if he would take up the offer.
"I have to be honest with you, John," he said. "I asked the bloke in the guitar shop about Eko guitars.
"He said they made terrible guitars and not to touch one with a barge pole. I bought a new guitar from him for $500."
Talk about gullible! I offer this 20-something groover a vintage guitar with solid top for virtually nothing and he believes a salesman who tells him not to touch it with a barge pole.
The Eko acoustics do have a special sound, probably because of the thick two-pack finish. The sound is thinner than one would expect from a solid-top guitar but certainly is characteristic of the Eko.
THE wrist pain eventually retreated, and I could play again. Almost a decade later, my old Eko serves me nicely.
A recent innovation was to sand the gloss from the soundboard finish and remove the big plastic scratchplate. This made the tone more even across the range.
Next time the strings are off, I may strip the soundboard back to the timber and just seal it with beeswax.
Such a procedure had a remarkable effect on a similar 1960s high-gloss guitar I had once. That was a Bolero – which a modern guitarshop hero probably would not touch with a barge pole.
The Bolero, with ply soundboard, was marvellous after a stripping and tinkering. Watch out, Eko!

More about home-made clamping systems

Repair of the old Eko acoustic takes a step …

A LITTLE palette-knife with long handle gets the glue in the right spot, using just a few drops of wood glue at a time so it doesn’t run everywhere. If the chocks are glued to the guitar, they could be in there until it receives the next big hit on a solid object.
The bottle set-ups (described in the last post) are placed out of the range of the area to be glued.
You must unscrew the bottle lid and judge the correct pressure/height by "feel" with your hand through the soundhole, if possible.
The Eko has a big soundhole and the split strut is within the vision, making the repair a little easier than it may have been if the damage was deeper in the guitar.
More luck: The back of the guitar is still fixed firmly to the sides, so the strut and the ding appear to be the only damage.

WHILE on back damage: Another clamping system I devised works well on reattaching a guitar back that has split off from the sides.
Take two flexible timber slats each about 1.3-1.5m long. The treated pine that is used on lattice is ideal because it is springy.
Put Slat 1 on the work area (floor or bench) and place the guitar body on it, taking care to position the body where it will need the pressure.
Now, lay the Slat 2 over the guitar back directly above the bottom slat. At this stage you should be able to pull together the ends of Slats 1 and 2 to judge the degree of pressure on the guitar back.
If it is difficult to pull together the slat ends, you may need longer slats.
Simply wrap wire around the slat ends to complete this custom-made guitar body clamp. The bends in Slats 1 and 2 should create arches over the body front and back and put pressure at the guitar sides.
To increase or decrease pressure, simply tighten or loosen the wire at the ends, or use G-clamps to pull the slats closer together.
Once you have it working, take it off, apply glue to the split and you are in business.

WITH the Eko, I use the lattice-slat technique in conjunction with the vitamin bottles to get the right mix of interior and exterior pressure and fix the strut and the ding.
The guitar then hangs around for another 10 years or so before I get around to replacing the missing nut and string it up for the first time.
It plays well but the thick resin finish appears to hold in a lot of the resonance. Nevertheless, the old Eko, bought for $2, is working again and I am happy.

Next: My failed attempt to give the guitar to a workmate.

Lifecycle of a 1960s Eko jumbo acoustic guitar

The guitar that I couldn’t give away is taking up some of my time nowadays. It’s a 60s jumbo acoustic Eko. Here’s the story:

A GARAGE sale crowd shuffles through a house in the Sydney inner western suburb of Petersham on a rainy Saturday morning in the late 1980s.
The vendor seems to be selling up and moving out in a hurry. A stocky man with long curly hair and maybe in his 30s, he is pacing around the house and attending to the swarm of buyers.
The terrace-style house is on the edge of the Italian precinct of Leichhardt and the Portuguese belt of Petersham and he speaks with an accent that suggests mediterranean heritage.
Racial origins are important to this story because it is about an Italian-made guitar that is the subject of one of the shortest conversations that day.
I ask, "How much?" He replies, "Two dollars." I hurriedly sift through coins in my left palm, drop the $2 into his hand, say "thank you" and leave as quickly as I can, trying not to seem too keen in case he reconsiders and wants the guitar back or more money.

THE guitar has a severe ding in the back and rattles, the sort of injury that suggests a swing when held by the neck and the impact of the body on a solid object.
Such a wound is a fairly common symptom of relationship tensions. It always makes one wonder whether the solid object was a head.
However, any head in the way of this guitar would be unlikely to think clearly again.
The 1960s Eko is one of the heavyduty items in the guitar army’s strike force. You could rewrite the "built like a tank" cliché and substitute "Eko".
Angled struts criss-cross under the solid timber soundboard. The whole guitar is coated with an incredibly thick epoxy type finish. It is heavy.

THE term "Italianate", sometimes with a connotation of extreme attention to detail, serves the Eko well.
The thickness of the finish can be seen in the chips from the edges. The final clear coat is about 1mm thick.
Behind the 50mm ding in this one, a split strut hangs loosely. The nut is missing.
Several weeks after the acquisition I repair the damage by using clamping systems that I have devised over the years.
The interior damage calls for the vitamin-bottle system. This involves using the screw top lids to exert pressure between the front and the back.
The threaded lids, in conjunction with a chock or two, top or bottom, allow a precise height adjustment. Sometimes a chock must be put on the bottom with double-sided tape to allow the device to be placed accurately in awkward positions, maybe deep inside the guitar. Other times, the chock may be taped to the guitar instead.

WORKING in such confines is difficult. You need a pen or small torch and a small mirror (a dental mirror is ideal) to inspect the interior. Barbecue tongs can help in the inspection and subsequent manoeuvring. Consider all sorts of small grabbing and holding mechanism – crocodile clips, clothing pegs, long-nosed pliers, kitchen utensils … mix and match and commandeer anything you can think of to suit the individual problem.
A hard hit has detached the Eko’s centre strut on one side but the other side has held tightly. Part of the strut has split away totally. It’s all fixable.

Story to be continued. Watch this site for more on the $2 guitar that in years to come I couldn’t give away. And that was just my good luck.

Dirty picture with knot in G-string

EVERYTHING has to be "sustainable" nowadays. Energy, industry, environment and guitar strings.
Now, guitarists around the world can join the throng, thanks to the dayinthelifeofaguitar string conservation and recycling plan.
This would save heaps of Red House (sorry, greenhouse) gases, if pluckers and strummers everywhere adopted the policy, Never Throw Out An Old String.
This writer has followed this policy for decades. See the picture showing simple string recycling techniques.
Some will smile, others laugh and others show their fangs in disgust.
But whatever emotions the shocking vision invokes, let one thing be clear.
The guitar plays well. Kept clean and free of ingrained grime and corrosion, old strings can keep serving long after they end their first term.
The Policy dates from the 1980s when I had a bit of a guitar collection. Updating the strings on one guitar is fair enough but try paying out for a dozen sets and tying up hundreds of dollars on instruments that are played only occasionally.
When I bought a secondhand guitar that missed a string or five, I simply reached for the String Recycle Box.
This allowed me to fully string up the guitar and test it for faults, action and intonation before starting any repairs and adjustments, and without risking good strings on the temporary task.
An essential part of the policy is, Never Cut A String End For Aesthetic Purpose, because you never know when you may need the practicality of those few spare centimetres.
The best way to join strings is to connect the anchor, as supplied by the manufacturer, on String 1 with the free end of String 2, which is passed through the hole on the anchor and twisted back around itself until it has no chance of slipping free.
In the mid-80s, my mate, Pat Hussey, a professional muso and a string fanatic, gave me a box of a few dozen of his old sets.
The "throwaways" that Pat replaced after a gig or two lasted me two decades.
I have only just started buying new strings. Over the years, many of my jamming mates have rolled around in hysteria after noticing the conglomeration of twisted wire on my headstocks.
But the saving gives the last laugh.
If you are addicted to the sound of new strings, you would not adopt my methods in a million strums, unless you were geographically disadvantaged or fiscally challenged.
However, if you use your strings for more than a few outings, you won’t notice any difference. Most of the jammers who at first collapse in mirth later say my guitars sound sweet, despite any string joins.
Even I take off a string when the winding breaks down.
When I bought new strings recently after so long out of the market, I had to admit they sounded good but a serial string recycler is unlikely to repent.