Fixing Grandma's Guitar; Advice Needed

[mirwa]

Cool.

Now that has been established, are we seeking just a functional guitar again or a restored guitar to its former glory.

Steve

[Tomy Two String]

I find that a heated, thin knife works well. Good for removing bridge, fingerboard, pickguard. I also use it to score the finish. You have to be careful how much you heat it up because it will burn the finish and wood. If you heat it up red hot it will cut through the glue like butter. Good for removing fingerboards from the neck or headstock laminate.

[printer2]

Fingerboard - Seems like you have a plan.

Soundboard - sounds good.

Brace - Make a new brace from spruce and glue it in on the pencil line where one is missing. (Is spruce the best wood to use?)

Yes spruce is what you would want to use. Not sure where you are getting your supplies from but if not from a luthier supplier you could check out hobby stores with balsa for RC model aircraft. The wood is good quality and has little runout from what I have seen. You want the grain aligned with the tall dimension at the end, looking like this, II.

Rosette - Remove the old rosette, make a new one, glue the new one in. (How do I remove a rosette?)

This is hard to do and the reason I suggested not to. I still think you should scrape the area and the parts that show damage from the clock just think of war wounds. It is not like you are trying to make the top look like new.

Removing the rosette would involve putting a plug in the sound hole, finding the center and putting a dowel or peg (I have a part of a bolt sticking up in a board I use for installing rosettes). You would then use a circle cutting jig and a router or Dremel to rout off the rosette. The rosette might go down up to half the thickness of the top but more likely a little less.

Now that you have the rosette off and a channel cut into the top you have to make another one or fit a bought one to the hole. Either adding to the diameter to fill in the oversized hole or to rout out some extra in case your rosette is bigger than the old one. After gluing in you need to scrape the rosette flush and then finish the top where the repair was made.

This is not an easy undertaking and most here will agree they would rather just replace a top and start fresh. Especially if you have no experience in doing something like this and the necessary tooling things can go from bad to worse quickly. If you are hell bent to do it look up some youtube vids to see how to do a rosette. It will give you a better idea on what is needed than we can tell in a few words.


Pickguard - Remove the old glue from the back of the pickguard, reglue it as one of the final steps. (Is there a solvent for dissolving glue?)

There are glue removers out there for home owners, test on the back in case of incompatibility with the finish.


Bridge - The brace on the inside of the guitar looks like it might be spuce, check the hardness to see if it is or something harder. I would just fill in the holes and put a 1/8" maple plate on top of it, the underside or inside of the guitar. Google bridge plates to see what we do.

Back - Might be a good idea (cheaper and easier) to get a mahogany back from a luthier supply house. You could cut and shape the braces and then bend the back on top of the braces to glue them. So have the brace with the flat part facing down on a table and then press the back over top of it. Or any way to achieve the same thing. You can glue the braces on one at a time. This will give you your radiused back more or less, it is not really a critical thing. A number of different radiuses used, 15`foot or greater radius.