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Notes of Music, organic gardening, eco-building, Permaculture designs and explorations along this Path in Life.

27 October 2013

Guitar bridge repairs

Along the path I have found several acoustic instruments that needed proper attention. Moisture and carelessness can make serious damage even to the best instruments. This is a quite cheap guitar but poor thing... it needs to be fixed!
The bridge it's coming off and actually all the top wood of the body is bending in a weird way: nothing I can do about that but maybe the bridge will last longer with some extra support and some wood glue.  

 First thing I carefully hand drill (by a hand powered tool) a couple of holes where to insert a screw and a nail: I figured in these two spots the situation was the most critical. Then I start to insert wood glue, brushing it in the crack with a small brush and soon cleaning all the spills.    

This operation needs to be repeated many times, allowing the glue to dry: as it dries, it shrinks a bit so a little more glue needs to be added until all the crack is nicely filled 

Then it's time for the nail and the screw to go in: I cut the head of the nail first, filing it smooth with fine grain sand paper. Then the nail, coated in glue, gets very gently hammered in. The screw is next.


So here it is at the end of the repair: I covered the head of the screw with a little plastic circle (hand cut by scissors from a used yogurt cup, then colored black with a permanent marker).
It looks good enough, right?!
After regulating the truss rod the harmonics matched again and the action of the strings lowered down to a more playable height: now the instrument can play again!

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