'65 Firebird repairs and dilemmas

[capohk]

Hi All

This lockdown business has me going back to some projects that were previously in the 'too hard box'. I've had a non-reverse firebird V from about 1965 that has a cracked neck. It's a great sounding guitar, the mini-humbuckers are just fantastic through my 5D3 and I actually like the skinny neck.

I pulled it apart and cleaned up some other bits - the pickup covers needed the solder warming back up as the joints had cracked away from the baseplate. The inside looked completely unmolested, still had some bits of crap from what I assume was the final assembly at the factory.

So my dilemma:

I don't know the history of this guitar. It came to me with the cracked neck. I've popped the nut off to have a proper look and the crack is clearly through the finish, but with a reasonable amount of pressure, I can't get it to open up. So either it doesn't extend into the wood significantly, or it's already been glued up. I can't see any sign of glue remnant either.

The top of the neck and the headstock is pretty flexy - it's not a great design from the point of stiffness and having the truss rod adjustment there makes things even worse. One idea was to remove the fingerboard and rout channels for carbon rods either side of the truss rod and angle them across the break/crack.

Or I could just clean up the finish and hope. I've included some pics of the guts in case folk are interested.

[capohk]

I should probably pre-empt the advice to take it to an experienced repair shop - if there was someone here I trusted more than myself, I would do that.

[rockabilly69]

Even with a headstock crack '65 Birds are worth a lot of money. An amateur repair is going to hurt any resale value. Let a pro handle it. Ship it if you have to! BTW I LOVE Firebirds!

[mirwa]

Originally Posted by capohk

I should probably pre-empt the advice to take it to an experienced repair shop - if there was someone here I trusted more than myself, I would do that.

It is a nasty head crack, but repairable.

Cheap repair and dear repair, since your doing it yourself, I will explain my dear repair and you can take from it what you will, but it will lead to a perfect finish end result.

First flex the headstock and insert titebond into any break
Pull the fretboard
Pull the headplate
I would use over head router to route two channels from the fretboard side into the headstock for strength.
Make and insert fresh wood into routes
Refit fretboard
Refit headplate
Sand smooth the crack area and back of headstock
Fill and close any voids in existing cracks
Refinish headstock and neck

End result is an invisble repair, structurally solid

Steve

[capohk]

Thanks, Steve - you are very generous with your knowledge. This is pretty much what I will do.

So the inevitable happened of course. In flexing the headstock back, I discovered that the crack pretty much went all the way through. I think the pictures below tell the story, but after some initial swearing, I realised that it is probably for the best - I can get a really good glue-up in there and clamp it well. I used my 12" radius sanding beam to keep the fretboard straight and made a cork caul to fit the back of the neck. There were a couple of chips that needed some careful attention but I was able to use a small brush to work original Titebond into all of the surfaces and cracks. I thought about using hot hide glue, but the open time is so short. This way I was really confident that I'd got everything seated properly before I clamped. I did a couple of dry runs just to make sure which helped.

The headstock has no head plate - it would benefit from one from the point of view of strength but I think I will keep it true to vintage and just scrape it flat and spray it black.

Because I was able to glue it and clamp it so well, I am still considering not adding the rout and inserts, but I have some carbon rod which would be perfect.I'll have to build the jig to do the routing, and so I may as well run carbon rod the full length of the neck. It will be invisible after the fretboard is replaced, and I think the extra stiffness in the neck can only improve the overall performance of the instrument.







Can't really see much in that last one, but it went together really well I think.

[mirwa]

Sometimes breaking it off completely is better, that way you can get glue into all the crevices, ?? looks like a vulcan fibre headplate, may be just paint

Steve