This guitar came into the shop in rough shape.
The top and back were separating from the sides, several braces were rattling around inside the body, and least surprisingly, the strings were about an inch off of the fretboard.
This guitar appears to have been made sometime in the mid-1950’s, and the glue that they used at the factory was disintegrated to the point where it was more of a dry powder.
So I got to work, removing the rest of what little bracing was still attached, then sanding and scraping off the remnants of the old powderfied glue.
Once all the glue was removed and all surfaces cleaned, I made a jig to elevate the outer perimeter of the back just slightly, then glued up the back bracing in the gobar deck.
This was needed due to the top and back not being perfectly flat, but at a very slight radius.
Side Note: These guitars were originally sold for a relatively low cost from department stores, and weren’t of the highest quality back in the day.
As such, the USA-based factories would slap them together and not follow the standard guitar building conventions of some of the other guitar manufacturers that are today associated with quality.
So despite the wooden nut, brass frets, non-radiused fretboard and lack of X-bracing on the top – the radiused soundboard & back, plus the genuine spruce bracing was a nice surprise.
For some reason, the top wasn’t nearly as bad as the back, and the glue was still strong in a most areas.
So it only took a couple rounds of gluing to get the top situated.
The top had to be glued to the sides before reattaching the top bracing.
Next the top bracing, along with the strange mahogany bridge plate (that spans the entire width of the top, for some reason).
The bracing looks crooked, but that’s how it was originally installed at the factory.
Striving to keep it as original-looking as possible, the bracing was reglued exactly in the same position.
The final round of gluing entailed gluing the back to the sides.
For this I used a 30’ bungee cord with my custom clamping deck that I made out of plywood.
It was very tedious to get the back flush with the ribs, especially after years of the 2 surfaces being separated from one another for such a long time, and settling into slightly different shapes.
Since the ribs were slightly smaller than the back, there was some slight (less than 1/8") overhang in a few places.
The overhangs were trimmed flush with the router, then sanded out so they blended seamlessly.
After blending, some black was added to match the surrounding areas.
Then some very thin clear coat to protect the color.
After the clear coats are dry, some light sanding and polishing was done to match the sheen of the rest of the guitar.
Once the finish blending was complete, the bottom of the bridge was sanded to match the new radius of the top, and the guitar was set up with fresh strings.
