1969 Martin D-28 Restoration - Part 4 | Setting the neck
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- Опубліковано 7 жов 2024
- In this series we’ll be restoring a very sorry looking 1969 Martin D-28 - the last year of the Brazilian back and sides.
In this episode I re-set the neck so that it's at the optimal angle for great action, remove the bridge then plug the old bridge pin holes. - Навчання та стиль
Looking great! I’ve been hoping for this video and looking forward to the next one. You’re making the best of a pretty messed up situation, and I really appreciate patients, care and concern for the old guitar.
Thanks very much for your kind words. The good news is that the next video is nearly ready so you shouldn’t have to wait too much longer!
@@BeardsworthGuitars Very good!
Hello Tom! I LOVE your content and this Martin series is truly fascinating! The fact that you also show mistakes is so fresh and enjoyable. It’s a great learning journey for me, as I also mess around with guitars (electrics so far and planning to restore an old nylon for the first time now). So keep up with the excellent work, I am truly looking forward to the next one. Ciao Dario
G'day Beardsworth Guitars,
Thanks for a great video. I'm enjoying this series - I like seeing someone who knows what restoration means. I was particularly interested in the method you used to remove the bridge. I have an old nylon string guitar, where the strings have torn through the bridge. It's just a cheap guitar that I bought in the 80's, to get back into playing, but it should be repaired. I'll give it a try one day. If I can remove the bridge without damaging the soundboard, I'll go through the rest of the guitar, & see how it all turns out.
Keep up the good work
Andrew
Hey Andrew, thanks for the kind words! This bridge removal method works great with both hide glue and regular white wood glue. You can get all sorts of heat blankets etc for the job but honestly an iron does the trick. It’s just a bit awkward. Good luck with your project! Thanks for the support.
Cheers, Tom
No worries, Tom. I'll pinch mum's iron to get the job done - just don't tell her what I've done with it. LOL
yet another great job and video cant wait to see the next
Coming soon!
Epoxy - 1936. Patent 1946. There times when it is fine, especially if the use is very limited, as here. Good stuff!
Interesting job, only just come across this series, so will check the full story. Epoxy has been around for a good while: fibreglass boats were made certainly from the early '60s, if not before.
Yeah I hadn’t really considered its use in things like fibreglass. Thanks for watching.
Great to see that you're addressing all the problems as you get to them. I think intonation above the 12th was always an issue with these guitars but let's be honest there's not usually much happening at the sticky end of a an acoustic guitar with a traditional body shape. Even Ted Woodford doesn't worry too much about this issue. It is what it is and you do what you can. Judging by the neck joint Martin were still doing everything by hand in the late 60's but that doesn't explain why the neck wasn't centralised with the bridge. I'm starting to ask myself whether it might be better and easier to just make a new bridge but you're the man up close so I expect you'll be taking a close look and weighing up your options. Using acetone on that old binding certainly scared me a lot but you've obviously done it before or you wouldn't have gone hell for leather on a vintage Martin. I'm looking forward to the next installment.
Yeah you don’t want to hang around with the acetone or stay in one place for too long because it definitely will turn the plastics to soup. That’s partly why I didn’t strip the paint with it. The bridge is actually not in bad shape. I think it just got glued back slightly off centre in a previous repair. Cheers for watching!
Curious situation here, and maybe I didn’t see something, but I watched it three times to be sure, when you are setting the neck, you place a piece of sandpaper on the body, say 5cm worth, then you set the neck on top of it and pull the sandpaper out. In your case you started by doing this five times to each side and then you did a little more on each side until you got the “set” you wanted. Now I notice you were very careful to do this and equal number of times on each side, which tells me this is a very sensitive adjustment and even the smallest amount of sanding makes a great difference.
So here’s my observation: switching our attention from side-to-side to front-to-back, when you draw the sandpaper through the joint all 5cm moves past the wood on the back of the neck but the front of the neck gets almost no sanding (I guess the very end gets cut by one grain of sand). Thus, after five pulls, the front has been sanded by five grains of sand while the back has seen twenty five centimeters of sanding paper come through. Does this uneven sanding treatment have the effect of making the neck tilt backwards ever so slightly adding to the bow or did I miss something you did to make the sanding strokes even from front-to-back?
Yeah this is a really good observation and is actually exactly what’s happening. Over time, guitar bodies fold slightly due to the tensile forces from the strings. The net result is that the neck tips too far forwards resulting in high action. When setting the neck what we are actually doing by design is moving more material from the end of the neck heel and less on the fretboard end of the heel. Essentially removing a very small triangular section of wood. So the fretboard end of the heel hardly has anything removed. The other advantage here is that removing material from the fretboard end would shorten the scale ever so slightly by moving the nut closer to the bridge. This with throw your intonation off. Just one correction here though - this process doesn’t make the neck bow. It remains straight- it’s just the it angles further backwards. Hope that helps!
It does, and thanks for the reply. The solution works well on a rebuild but would work against you on a new rebuild. Didn’t think about it getting closer to the nut. Another very good point. Thanks for the response.
Titebond II ??.. Why not original Titebond, it doesn't creep over time
I normally use Titebond 1 on my builds and for everything else will be using hot hide glue on this one. But for the veneers the glue’s sole purpose is just holding the veneers in place. The forces are compressive rather than tensile and the veneers are sandwiched between the neck tenon and the neck block mortise so creep wasn’t a concern.