Repair - Yamaha "crazy girlfriend" dreadnought guitar restoration Part 1

 The story I was told by the previous owner is that his girlfriend in a fit of rage picked up his beloved guitar and tried to assail him with it, but missed and hit the wall. Below is the result of her crazed efforts:

Once I received it straight to the shop it went for much needed TLC, first removing the paint that had been transferred from the wall onto the finish in the area of the impact:

You can almost see the motion that the guitar was swung and the force that must have been put on it as it collided with the wall. 

Fortunately paint removes fairly easily with rubbing alcohol and patience. This would prove to be the easiest "fix" the guitar needed.

Once that was done it was on to making a few pieces of missing structural elements using donor wood from scrap pieces. Below is the piece i cut to size for part of the interior per-felling which was dislodged and lost

Then lots and lots of clamping...

...and clamping all the sides together and the top to the new interior bracket...

and more clamping and

and more clamping, lots of clamping!

More clamping... this time trying to flatten out the various flaps of wood that had become a roller coaster of cracks along the back

Below are some of the various tools needed for gluing, wood work, color matching and finishing

Now we can start filling the cracks and holes with patches and sawdust...

This is shot of the interior of the guitar box. It was necessary to glue a flat patch piece to the inside of the back portion that was blasted out so that all the flayed flaps of wood could be glued down and flattened. My son drew a picture of a guitar on the piece as a little Easter egg.

Now made a template for the largest patch pieces(I affectionately called the penguin for its avarian shape)

Filling a concave area of the scar with some sawdust and glue

Prepping for the "penguin" patch piece to be finalized and glued into place

Penguin patch piece in place and sanded down to match the radius curve of the body

And here all the little fills have been done to try to make the area one cohesive smooth as possible plain

Also starting the first round of staining, touch-up and spot matching. Using Mini-wax golden oil based stain to start a nice yellow amber iridescent base.

And more touching up, the finish was tough to match because from different angles the light changed the color and tone. Also had to scratch some grain in the patches as they weren't matching up and causing the eye to focus on them

Now time to start paying some attention to the side channel route and filling it so it can be finished using black nail polish.

Starting the first build up layers of nail polish to try to fill the channel evenly and also match the existing binding as it meet the new nail polish binding.

This is it after 3 or 4 layers of nail polish with base sanding and then polishing it up to try to mimic the other binding.

Finally I used Mini-wax furniture polish to fill in the grain and buff and polish the area back so that it matched the surrounding gloss finish.

Repair - Soviet Era Acoustic guitar 1980's

This was a special repair as it was my girlfriend's Ella family guitar that all of the children learned to play guitar on. Unfortunately, the neck had broken into the body and needed to be removed and reset to playable shape, along with cleaning, detailing, setup and new strings. Its unique in its construction as it utilized a bolt on neck and a floating fretboard extension.

Open headstock, classical peg tuner style

You can see the grooves from fingernails and years of playing. This instrument is a generational one and has been passed down from father to daughter and will be passed down to her children.

            Various pieces remaining from the break all of which need to be put back into the guitar.

The bridge utilizes a piece of fret wire for the saddle. It had become pitted and oxidized from time so I sanded, buffed and polished it.

Lots of clamping to repair and reseat the neck block which was partially broken and required fully breaking to be able to fix it properly.

I replaced the missing piece from the top...

and put two cleat underneath to make sure that it had plenty of structural stability

Touch-up time! Some of the paper rosette had been damaged so I found some of my son's markers and went to town trying to recreate of the of the patterns and colors.

                    Then I cleaned the tuning keys hardware to remove of the the rust and pitting

                        before                                                                        after