1920s Weissenborn Style 1 Hawaiian Hollowneck Guitar
Around the shop we've called this guitar the "Destroyssenborn" ever since our pal Mike Brown left it to get worked on (in March of 2022). Its top was off and split and distorted in a number of ways and essentially all of its bracing south of the soundhole was missing or damaged aside from the bridge plate. It also looked far more hideous than it does now, but luckily old guitars tend to clean-up nicely.
It's a Style 1 Weissenborn -- the lowest level of decoration for one of his instruments -- but it's still pretty drop-dead gorgeous. It has flamed koa throughout its build and, even with all of the water-damage grime on the top, it still glows nicely.
Work was fairly intense -- I needed to rebrace the entire lower portion of the top and then fit the top back onto the back and sides which, of course, no longer really fit anymore. The bridge then needed to get reglued and all of the cracks needed to be filled. Rather than fit entirely-new wood in, I just filled them which yields a look like it had been done a hundred years ago -- which was the point. Mike uses all of his equipment hard and on the road all year long so the emphasis really has to be on stability more than anything else.
My rebracing job was not traditional in the sense of materials -- I used laminated fir/carbon fiber braces but did install them in roughly the same pattern as the original braces were installed -- an X/A-frame design that puts a triangle around the bridge plate area and has tons of strength. The laminated braces have a lot of stiffness which lets me get them very low and thin and I replaced all of the "finger bracing" with very thin ply instead which has the advantage of letting the top vibrate more freely at its edges outside the main X pattern and also helps to cleat/steady the myriad cracks in the top.
I know it's not original but for this guitar with its special needs, I think it was a very useful alteration of the instrument considering that only a little bit of the original lower-bout bracing survived. The end result sounds like Mike's other Weissenborns but with more power than his other Style 1 and a little more emphasis on sweet, long-sustain mids and high-end than his Style 2.
Oh, and before I forget -- there's a whole replacement section of side/endblock on the bottom that was installed before my time -- that's another repairman's work.
Now, how about some "in-process" shots?
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