1927 Martin 00-18 Flattop Guitar

This is a customer's guitar that has been lingering in storage for a long while. I remember taking it out of is packaging and taking one look at the brutal cracks on its side and thinking, "ah, that can wait a bit."

Suffice to say, crunch time catches-up to everyone and I finally made good on getting it ready. It already had a number of repairs done to it -- a neck reset and replacement bridge (good jobs) and then repairs to the treble-side cracks that were so-so. I say so-so because someone installed cork lining on that entire side internally to help stabilize the cracks. Yikes!

My work included repairing and stabilizing bass-side cracks, a level/dress of the frets (though I think Jose may have done that part of the job), a whole lot of cleaning, a replacement saddle, replacement bridge pins and endpin, and setup work.

During the time this guitar was made, Martin was in transition from building gut-strung (modern: nylon/classical) guitars to making steel-string guitars. This '27 00-18 is thus lightly x-braced in a scalloped manner, paper-thin in its top and body woods, and light as a feather. These are all ideal things for gut-strung instruments but mean that the heaviest steel-string gauges one should use on something like this are 50w-11s -- which I have on it and it's holding-up just fine, though my usual suggestion is 46w-10 gauges if you're going to go steel on a period Martin. I'm risk-averse!

Interestingly, this guitar came with a replacement bridge (of good quality) and replacement Waverly tuners (also of good quality, but without their buttons). The nut is also non-original. Despite its beat looks, however, the bracing was all pat inside and in good order.