Poopsidoo in Spartanburg, South Carolina wrote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by poopsidoo
I have heard these will”gouge” out. My 1965 J-45 fingerboard is starting to show that. Is there any repair short of replacement? What would that look like?
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Hey, my roommate at the Citadel was from Spartanburg, as was one of the nastiest of all the upperclassmen. My roomie was a good guy, though.
To answer your question, because rosewood is somewhat softer than ebony, yes, it can and sometimes will start to develop runnels where most of the wear takes place.
It can happen a
lot faster than the decades of use you’ve gotten out of the guitar: if a player doesn’t trim his fingernails to keep them short and/or practices poor personal hygiene and doesn’t wash his or her hands before playing, plowing furrows into the rosewood is the result.
Ironically, some of the folks who pride themselves on taking good care of their guitars can set themselves up for premature rosewood fingerboard damage if they slather oil on it at every string change, or any more often than about twice a year.
They usually like the wood to look glossy and think they’re cleaning and protecting the fingerboard when they oil it, when, in fact, excess oil softens the wood and attracts dirt and grit, besides. That grit and dirt acts precisely like sandpaper and just digs the furrows deeper.
You can’t tell those guys that, though - they bristle with indignation if you try.
Anyway, if you’ve been playing this guitar for as long as you have and are only seeing this fingerboard wear now, you’re clearly not playing with dirty hands greasy with fried chicken and dripping with the juice from raw peanuts purchased by the roadside in South Carolina...
The raw peanuts and the Spanish moss are two of the things I miss the most about South Carolina. But do y’all up in the foothills even have Spanish moss? My people are all from the Lowcountry - Charleston and Savannah, mostly - so I’ve never spent much time upcountry.
Back to the guitar repairs in question: this can be fairly simple work but it’s time-consuming, so it’s not a quick, easy or inexpensive repair. The only sensible and cost-effective time to get it done is when you need to have the guitar refretted. The frets
have to be out of the way when the repair tech planes the fingerboard to eliminate the gouging that’s taken place.
So I’d recommend that you talk to your friendly local guitar tech and find out what the combined repair will cost you. Unless you’re really digging your way to the opposite side of the planet with the damage that’s occurred so far, you’re probably okay to hold off until it’s time for a complete fret replacement.
But get a professional assessment as soon as you can. If you’ve dug so far into the wood that you almost need to replace the entire fretboard itself, get the work done right away because replacing the whole thing will be very costly, much more expensive than simply planing the fingerboard and replacing the frets.
So, short version: take the guitar to an experienced guitar repair tech and get an assessment of where the matter stands right now, and an estimate on what needs to be done and what it’s going to cost to fix it.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s not going to be an inexpensive repair; it might cost several hundred dollars. How many hundreds, I can’t tell you, because that’s going to depend on what needs to be done.
For example, if the wear isn’t too bad your repair tech might be able to pull just the first seven or nine frets and plane only that part of the fretboard. Don’t count on that, though - this goes beyond just the frets and the fingerboard. There are some fairly complex neckset geometry issues that all have to be addressed when this sort of instrument repair is needed.
But if the guitar sounds good enough that you’ve owned it and used it for such a long time - which, obviously, you have - then it’s definitely worth spending the amount needed to maintain it and keep it fully functional.
Hope this helps.
Wade Hampton Miller