Workshop: Epiphone Archtop Guitar Neck Reset Tip

This is an Epiphone Emperor I recently worked-on. Someone had done a reset in the past but the neck was pulling-up and the action had gotten really high. I'm going to walk you through my "easy way" of getting an Epiphone archtop neck off.

Most Epis have a heel cap. Here I'm removing it with a seam separator.

I think use my thin, long drill to drill through the back of the heel and into the dovetail joint. This is like a 20-30 degree angle, usually, and you can feel the drill go through the void at the front of the joint.

This is as opposed to the "usual way" of heating a joint up -- pulling the "fret after the joint" out, drilling through the fret slot, and sticking the heat directly down into the dovetail from the top.

I prefer going through the heel on Epis because the fretboard extension on top has some mildly-complicated geometry and bits (a truss rod, for one) in the way it's build. The necks on these are usually "stuck" with some glue in the middle-lower portion of the joint, too, so the heat gets targeted quickly.

Here are the foam-cutters warming-up the joint. I squirt glue down the holes with a syringe to keep the heated area slightly damp -- and that moisture will turn to steam and make it easier to pull the joint apart.

Here's the removal! That was after about 30 minutes on the heater, softening the glue. You can see the shims used to tighten-up a sloppy joint, here, too. The problem was that the last repair shop did not fit the bottom of the heel tight in the dovetail. They got the fit (with the shims) overall "OK" but, with the joint dry and the neck re-fit into there, it's easy-enough to pull the heel away from the guitar with just a little tension in the state seen here.