Tuners & feedback :: 2012 Epiphone Casino NA [6.4 lbs]

June 7, 2016

A good customer brought his new-to-him Casino in for a little work. We swapped out the tuners for Grover Sta-Tite open back tuners. The mounting holes on the back lined up, but I had to play around with the bushings. Normally with press-in bushing tuners, I keep the original bushing in the headstock and install the new tuners. The issue was that the Grover tuner posts were a hair too large to fit the bushings. So you would think that I could just swap out the original bushings for the Grover ones, right? Nope. The Grover bushings were too small to stay in the headstock so I had to remove the original bushings, ream out the inside diameter of the bushings and re-install. Ah the joys of modding import guitars: replacing metric components with mis-matched imperial unit hardware.

The player was also having feedback issues with the full hollow / P90 design of the Casino. An inexpensive fix was to stuff black foam inside the f-holes to help reduce the sensitivity of the body. Oddly enough, the foam I used was from my stash of foam that Stewmac uses to package Waverly tuners.

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Mastery Vibrato :: 1997 Fender Jaguar [9.2 lbs]

February 11, 2016

This killer Japanese Jag has been in the shop a few times before. One time for a Mastery Bridge install, Lollar pickups installed and again for a Curtis Novak middle pickup install (here and here). Now it's back in for some finishing touches including new tuners, a Mastery string tree and a Mastery Vibrato (with UFO tip). All I can say is that this is one of the best, most versatile guitars I've worked on. The player that owns this guitar is a monster and I love hearing him play it when he brings it by. Dammit, now I need a 3 pickup (Lollar / Novak) Mastery Jag!

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Fret ends & new tuners :: Relic Tele partscaster [7.4 lbs]

February 11, 2016

Remember this guy from a couple months ago when it was in for a voodoo drop-signal repair? It's back in for new tuners (purchased pre-relic'd to match) and a fret end dress. Thankfully the signal is still going strong.

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100 Year Old Restoration :: Lyon & Healy Bowl Back Mandolin [1.3 lbs]

August 13, 2015

100 Year Old Restoration :: Lyon & Healy Bowl Back Mandolin [1.3 lbs]

Whew! Finally finished up this ~100 year old mandolin restoration a couple weeks ago. Let's see ... neck & fingerboard reglue, missing soundhole pieces, cracked / loose top bracing, loose back ribs, new inlayed pickguard (courtesy of Dave Nichols Custom Pearl Inlay), new bridge and properly spaced new tuners (peghead had to be bunged & redrilled). A lot of hours into this little fella. Excited to drop it off to it's new owner. I went to high school with him in PA and this was his grandmother's mandolin. Always an honor to work on family heirlooms.

Until I gather everything into a single blog post, you can check out the previous progress of this project here.