Back to the Cromwell, and a few other tidbits

So, a couple months ago we made a spruce patch for a dig in the top of the Cromwell. We carved out a small bowl shape, supported the heck out of the underside of the top, then pressed a wet piece of spruce wood into the hole with a LOT of pressure.

Later on, and completely undocumented, we unclamped the thing, and glued that press-fit and now dry piece of spruce into the hole.

Last week, it was chisel time.

This is after we started carving. Basically, we took a nice, flat chisel with a bent handle, and started bringing the patch down. 

This is the final product. 

The patch is a nice fit, fills the space perfectly, and even has grain that is a good match to the surrounding grain. It is also very light. 

The plan is to expose the patch to a lot of sunlight, and then add some tint and shellac to blend it in. It looks better than a big divot in the top, and it's a lot stronger.  

The patch looks great, and it is very well fit. This beats sitting down and carving a patch for hours while chalk fitting. It was pretty terrifying to squish a chunk of spruce on the top of a vintage instrument with tremendous pressure, but, thanks to careful placement of cauls under the top, there is no damage at all.

A violin project came over to me from a cousin, who want to be able to play this family heirloom. It had spent most of its life strung left handed, even though it was built right handed. Someone added mechanical tuners some time in the past, and there was a terrible reglue of the fingerboard at some time in the past, using really gooey epoxy that failed to harden.

I've already stripped most of the hardware. 

I did a quick glue job on this crack. 

But when I removed the tuners - oh my goodness. That is a real mess. 

That is a LOT of damage, and the neck is badly warped as well. It may be time to think of just replacing the neck. 

It was a hide glue day, so I glued up several projects. Just separated backs and sides. 

Ray is also working on a banjo, a nice Bacon FF banjo with a pretty poorly set neck. He was building up the end of the dowel stick to reset the angle, and had to also fill the screw hole. Fun stuff!

Small Kamaka and Guild work

Okay, I got a little bit of work done yesterday. Mostly, I cleaned the garage, made a new sanding board, played electric guitar for the first time in ages, and did a little work on the Kamaka and the Guild. 

I started carving away the new piece to make it look right. The big problem was that the grain was slightly diagonal, so I had to carve in the direction from the nut to the body on one side, and from the body to the nut on the other side, otherwise I would take out a huge chunk of wood following the grain, and that would probably be bad. I used a knife for most of the carving. 

Carve, sand and carve some more, then level the thing with the current fretboard. 

From the back, all looks well. This uke, like most Kamaka ukes of this period, is remarkably asymmetrical, I assume the neck was quickly formed on a belt sander. 

From the front, pretty good, although the grain is not as good a match as I might have hoped. That's enough for now - this is about 40 minutes of work to get to this point. 

I pulled the Guild D35 out, and decided to get the neck to actually sit in the pocket. I sanded, chiseled, and worked for about 45 minutes, and got it pretty close. 

Sanding revealed some significant cracks in the neck block that I could not see before. 

Pretty bad stuff. I wicked in some thin CA glue and clamped it good and tight. 

A block inside, and one outside, and LOTS of pressure. I want that crack closed, otherwise there could be some nasty trouble in the future. The neck could move around, and that would defeat all this work. 

This morning, I took of the clamp, and put the neck in the pocket. It's pretty sloppy right now. 

The glued up area. 

It's really hard to get a picture of this, but I want the top of the fingerboard to be in a plane that intersects the top of the bridge. I'm a little low now, it was better yesterday before I fixed the block. That tells me that I am on the right track, though, because if I hadn't fixed the block, I would have falsely assumed that everything was fine. 

Oh man, this is going to look so nice when it is done. That fretboard is a little gaudy, but what the heck - this poor guitar deserves it after all it has been through!

Not much work will happen for the next few days - I'll be very busy with family coming over, and shuttling the kids around from event to event.

More Kamaka

Okay, not a whole lot got done today, but what got done was good.

I sanded some more. 

And more.

And more! I'm not going to be able to eliminate that gouge on the side, that would simply be too risky. 

This was an amazingly thin neck to start with, and now I'm on the cusp of breaking the thing altogether. 

I made a piece to fit, but it ended up too thin. Time to make a second one. 

I needed the ends to be perfectly square to the bottom, so I got out a level and used it as a kind of shooting board, holding the piece against it while sanding on my sanding board. 

I had to round the edges slightly, as there was no way I could get the inside corners of the cutout area perfectly square. And after all this, we decided that the piece was a terrible mismatch in looks, so I made a third. 

I had other Kamaka ukes out for comparison. I'm getting to know a lot more about the Gold label era Kamakas. 

After making the third piece, it was time for some glue and an overnight stint in a clamp. 

Looking at this Kamaka and the others, I'm guessing that it is a late 50's, early 60s uke. It has a "W" written on the neck block, exactly the same as the "W" written on the neck block of another uke I have that is known to have been made in 1961, so that would be a good guess for the year. These don't have serial numbers, so that is about as close as I'm going to get for a guess.

Kamaka Uke, sanding blocks, and filling in missing wood

So, the last thing I posted before was about sanding blocks. Here we go.

Sanding blocks

 There you go. Get a piece of wood, and glue sandpaper to one side. After it is dry, take it to your belt sander and true up the edges. You now have a sanding block that can get into corners and clean up all kinds of problems. This is what I used to clean up the place where the bridge goes on the Cromwell, and what I started using to set up the Kamaka for wood replacement.

Speaking of the Kamaka, here is my first idea.

The sides are now flat diagonals, and I have put in some koa in the deep part of the slot. 

Not too great. 

Really ugly from the side, there is some significant wood loss here. 

I started trimming a new piece to fit in. This is an early shot, I got it to fit quite well. It's a tough fit, though.

My friend Ray came over, and we started looking at what I had done, and the instrument overall, and decided to get more drastic.

Just chop it all out, the heck with it. Much easier to fit a nice piece in. 

But how will I flatten out the bottom of that space? With another custom sanding block, of course! I made this and sanded it to barely fit in the space. I managed to get down pretty far, then the sandpaper came off, and I had to go pick up the kids, and it was time to quit. I'll get back to it tomorrow, though. 

 That is a lot of wood to remove, but it will be stronger for it. Frankly, there is no good way to fix this disaster, short of making a new neck, which I will end up doing if the thing breaks at some point. For now, this is going to create a workable solution.

I also took a look at the Cromwell with Ray.

This is that hole. 

The patch now fit perfectly. Hooray! I won't glue this up until the back braces are done, though.  

There was a nasty piece of missing wood at the bridge, so we chiseled out a bowl shaped hole. 

A little sanding made it smoother, and more bowl shaped. 

We carved a piece of spruce to roughly fit, then soaked it really well and clamped it on hard. The pressure will help it form to the hole, and then I can glue it on and shave it level. 

We ended up leaving off the wax paper, so that the moisture helps form the top as well. There will be some color and finish work to do, but at least there will be wood there to color and finish! The chip out in that spot was really bad from the previous bridge failure. 

 I'd never heard of doing a spruce repair this way before. I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Improving a Johnson resonator

So, last Christmas, I ended up with a Johnson resonator. (Don't ask). This is one of the early really cheap ones. Cheap construction, lots of badly placed plywood for the resonator to sit on, and a WAY too heavy spider.

WHOA!! Six ounces is a LOT of weight. 

The good folks at Paul Beard sell an import spider "for experimentation only" that weighs in at a bulky 5.7 ounces, this is even HEAVIER. What a great way to deaden sound!

Shallow slot

In Dan Erlewine's acoustic guitar repair videos (GREAT videos, by the way. Worth the money. Go buy them.) he spends a lot of time going over resonator upgrades. One key point is that the slots need to be a lot deeper to really hold the saddle correctly. That also removes a little bit of metal, not a bad deal.

I took the spider over to the belt sander and went to town, taking off material in the webbing between the legs. I also flattened the spider so that it no longer rocked on a flat surface.

Not bad, but could be better. You can see the curves in the webbing. 

Using three hack saw blades taped together to deepen the slot. 

I managed to take off .8 of an ounce. 

Lightening the bridge and improving the saddle slot really helped the guitar sing. It was amazing how much better it sounded. I'm sure I could do more, but I'm not sure how much more material I could remove without weakening the spider.