Chief's Log, Storedate 7.23.1.7

I've only been back from break for a few days, now, but I've been busy getting things ready like a madman. A number of items sold and I shipped what I could out, but a few had to be adjusted and modified before shipping. Here's a Gibson L-1 that got lefty-fied yesterday via a new saddle and setup adjustments. I try to make it easy to "righty-fy" lefty guitars again by providing alternate saddles and string slots cut to accept both gauges.

Here's a 1970 Martin 000-18 I worked-on last year. I did just about everything it needed but the original glue job on the bridge finally failed so here's the last nail in this coffin, I hope, for a while!

I love oddball guitars and used to be tres excited when funny old Teisco/Kawai jobs like this hollowbody came in the shop. I've figured-out how to iron out their nuisances, though, so even through they can be wonky and unstable, once you know "the list" to go down, they can be made into solid, functional instruments.

This one got an interior support rod fit through the body from neckblock to endblock, a reglue of its fretboard and truss rod aluminum channel, a level/dress and seating of the frets, and some bridge modding and setup work before it was rolling. But here's the thing -- even though I never feel comfortable charging "full tick" on these oddballs, I love recycling them into "real" guitars.

One more sadness -- I wanted a good SG to be my "pedal input device" so I grabbed a nice, quite clean, black, Greco SG ('89) from Japan -- and it's perfect except that FedEx decided to drop some huge weight into the middle of the package and wreck the neck joint.

I'm hoping that after claims are done with I can either buy the guitar (wrecked) from them to fix-up and use or keep it somehow, though, because it ticks all the boxes for me on an SG -- lightweight (6 lbs), has the right profiling on the body, the right materials, and the neck is shaped like a '60s SG neck. SIGH. I even had an aluminum tailpiece and ABR bridge ready for it. Oh well! We'll see...

Today (Saturday) was a good one. It was quite busy with a lot of "short repairs" getting done early and then in the afternoon Mr. Todd & Mr. Ancel came to work on projects and we had good laughs all-around.

Oh, and an important thing: I've updated the museum to the end of December. That took quite a time to organize, but it gets better each time I work on it as I iron-out rough spots.

And one last thing: you know when you feel you've been through enough one week and then your catalytic converter falls down? Yeah. Fortunately I know some good folks who patched me right up!