1950s Artur Lang Standard Archtop Guitar

Artur Lang was a fine, German builder who mostly worked in the '40s and '50s, as I recall. He built around 800 guitars and all in his own workshop. They tend to be very-much just like this guy -- carved-top, carved-back, wider-bodied, deco-looking archtop guitars with a ton of sex appeal and excellent curves. The neck is comfy and fast, too, and it's easy on the eyes.

This one sounds tremendous (it's loud, full, and gutsy) but it was definitely quite the chore to get it back into playing shape. It arrived with a bad old neck reset job and the heel/neck-proper seam failing. I extracted both the "neck proper" and the lower portion of the heel that got stuck in the joint. I reglued them and reinforced that glue joint with internal bolts. I then reset the neck.

After that, I had to tackle a badly-warped neck. I did that by pulling the frets and refretting with jumbo stock that I could level and dress into submission. That worked rather decently but it was a huge fuss to get the neck "essentially straight" by grinding the frets.

That work done, I fit a new bridge (supplied by the owner), cleaned it up, and set it up. I strung it with 50w-11 strings because I know that neck can't handle much more than that. It doesn't need a ton more oomph, however, because it sounds tops with the 11s on it already. Who'd'a thunk it? I was worried it was going to be a whispering giant (the top is 1/4" thick at the f-holes!) but it turned-out to be a cannon. We win!

Note that there are some cosmetic issues -- the pickguard is missing, the heel cap shrank a lot, and there's tons of pickwear on the top to boot. My heel repair is not as clean as I would have liked but it had some challenging geometry (angles that wanted to slide in clamps -- hence having to install some locator pins to align them) and the "neck proper" had been separated somewhat form the "heel bottom" for long-enough that the two pieces were not perfect matches anymore. Sigh...