Posted on July 1, 2022March 5, 2024 by Dale Phillips Questions: Damaged Ironbird Questions: Damaged Ironbird by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #94, 2008 Adam from the Internet asks: I have a B.C. Rich 2003 Platinum Pro Ironbird. Got seriously damaged in shipping. The body has five cracks, in some places that I don’t know are even possible to fix. I play technical death metal, black metal, Gothenburg death metal, and all those styles, my favorite being neo-classical metal. The body is agathis. I have an EMG Zakk Wylde set in it. (I could care less about Zakk Wylde. The set, though, is the standard 85/81 combo.) There is a large crack that goes down the middle of the body from where the neck goes on (bolt on neck — the action is great though), then two cracks around the cutaway near the neck (I need to have that so I can have fast access to the 24th fret). There’s another on the back that’s spread just past the serial number plate. I think I’d just want to fix it so I could play it again. I’m not at all concerned about looks right now. B.C. Rich 2003 Platinum Pro Ironbird. Photo by Adam G. John Calkin from Greenville, Virginia responds: Go to a hobby shop and buy water-thin superglue. Also buy superglue accelerator. Take all the hardware and electronics off the guitar. Mask off the cracks with a heavy coat of good car wax — don’t use tape. Push/tap the broken wood back into alignment and trickle in some superglue. It will wick into the crack. If it wants to run out of the crack into a cavity or out the other side of the guitar, use some accelerator to solidify it at the point of runout, not at the fill point of the crack. Keep trickling the glue in. Work slowly and keep looking for exit points for the glue so you don’t make a big mess on the other side of the guitar or something. Keep wiping the glue buildup off the wax and rewax as many times as you have to to keep the paint surfaces clean. Eventually the wood will be completely sealed inside and the glue will stop seeping in. It’s almost like welding wood. If you’ve been careful, there should only be a line of glue right at the crack to clean up. Scrape it clean with a razor blade, sand level with 1000 grit wet/dry paper, polish with automotive rubbing compound, and you are good to go. I’d bet a lot of money that your guitar will be as sound as it ever was if you do this right. I also have to warn you that I’ve seen guys make a horrible mess of their guitars trying to do this, with glue drips and buildup everywhere. But unless they ran glue into the pots or something, their guitars were fixed. If this sounds intimidating, find a pro to do it. It’s not that big of a deal, you just have to be very careful.
Posted on April 8, 2022March 5, 2024 by Dale Phillips Cleaning Shop, Part 2 Cleaning Shop, Part 2 by John Calkin Published online by Guild of American Luthiers, April 2022 see also, Cleaning Shop Part 1 by John Calkin There aren’t many scraps in a guitar shop that are useful for making guitars. What guitarmaker would throw those out? But if you scale down to flat-back mandolins or ukuleles you can make use of a lot of expensive material that would otherwise end up in a landfill. The wood I threw out in Cleaning Shop Part 1 was wood I thought I wouldn’t live long enough to use. I had no one to pass it on to. After working for Huss & Dalton for 19 years and more than 4000 guitars I had a crazy amount of scraps. The material I still have should keep me working on my own for years to come. ◆ Quartersawn spruce and cedar strips for center seam back grafts. All photos by John Calkin. Fingerboard cut-offs for banjo tailpieces, heel caps, inlays, etc. Rosewood aplenty for headstock caps, inlays, heel caps, laminated fingerboards and bridges. Material for back grafts and end grafts. Neck stock. (The fingerboards didn’t come from anyone’s scrap pile.) Spruce and mahogany ukulele tops and backs. Mahogany for uke sides comes from the neck stock. More fingerboard cut-offs, good for fingerboard bindings and laminated bridges. Just to present ideas, these ukulele or mandolin fretboards were laminated from mahogany and rosewood. A banjo tailpiece. Unfinished boxes made of mahogany, rosewood, and ebony. What? You don’t make crafty gifts and stuff in your shop? see also, Cleaning Shop Part 1 by John Calkin
Posted on March 4, 2022March 5, 2024 by Dale Phillips Wet Inlay Wet Inlay by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #66, 2001 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013 In my infancy as a luthier I didn’t have a lot of skills, but I still wanted my instruments to be different from any others. And I wanted them to be fancy. That might have been a combination headed for disaster, but I discovered a few tricks that let me achieve my goals while I simultaneously learned to build instruments worth owning and playing. One of those tricks was wet inlay. I loved the look of guitars draped in abalone trim, but I was sure the work was beyond me. Shell was also way too expensive for a project that might be botched and tossed in the dumpster. Tonewood was nearly out of my reach; there was no way I could invest in cut shell, too. The road to settling on turquoise trim was roundabout. I went to college in Colorado, where silver-and-turquoise Indian jewelry was everywhere. Most American turquoise is mined in Arizona, and the surrounding states have a strong turquoise culture. From a jewelry-making class, I learned that the blue stone is pretty hard, requiring lapidary equipment to cut and polish it. And not only is the good stuff fairly expensive, it’s pretty boring. Quality turquoise is a one-dimensional shade of blue with no grain or color intrusions. Eventually I realized that the jewelry I admired the most was the cheap stuff, chips of turquoise mixed in a clear matrix of some sort, ground flat, and polished. I was pretty sure I could do that to instruments. I could see into a future when turquoise-trimmed instruments would be my famous trademark. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on December 21, 2021March 5, 2024 by Dale Phillips Cleaning Shop, Part 1 Cleaning Shop, Part 1 by John Calkin Published online by Guild of American Luthiers, December 2021 see also, Cleaning Shop Part 2 by John Calkin Anyone who has entered the field of lutherie in the last 25 years will have a difficult time envisioning the lutherie scene when we Old Farts came up in the 1960s through about 1985. There were very few books available, and useful magazine articles were scarce. Tools and jigs had to be made in the shop. Previously owned instruments were used; there were no vintage instruments until George Gruhn began telling us there were. A few small outfits sold tonewood. There were no mega-suppliers like today. When I slotted my first fretboards I saved the sawdust in 35MM film canisters to use as wood filler. I saved every scrap of precious hardwood I encountered. My life as a luthier packrat had begun. I had my own shop from 1980 until 1997. I started with dulcimers and added hammered dulcimers, electric guitars, flattop mandolins, bouzoukis, resonator guitars, bowed psalteries, banjos, ukuleles, and acoustic guitars. Each instrument required separate molds, benders, wood, workboards, jigs, and often tools. I was able to move quite a bit of stuff when I changed states, maintaining my status as a packrat, but my bad habit exploded when I hired on with Huss & Dalton. I worked there for 19 years, and many scraps from the more than 4000 guitars and banjos we made came home with me. As the years went by I spent less and less time in my shop, yet the collection of stuff continued to swell. Seriously, the concrete floor began to fracture. I knew other packrats well enough to notice the signs of the disease. As their collections increased, the old stuff was buried under the new. Yet in their minds they not only thought they could remember it all but how and when it would all be used. They were pathetic. When I finally realized I was avoiding my shop because of the clutter, I had to face the fact that I was one of "them". I began tossing bits and pieces but the shop looked the same. I backed my truck up to the shop door and threw in all the obvious dross, but the next day I couldn't tell the difference. The second load contained enough rosewood and ebony to tilt my truck slightly sideways, not to mention sections of old-growth redwood 6x6s a friend had given me that I was eventually going to jig up to resaw into quartersawn soprano ukulele tops. Parts of my shop saw daylight for the first time in 20 years. I'm still not done, but I think I've lost my rank as a first-class packrat. I'm down to third-class, maybe. So what was all that stuff? You'll have to wait for Part 2. ◆ Both photos by John Calkin. see also, Cleaning Shop Part 2 by John Calkin
Posted on October 26, 2021March 5, 2024 by Dale Phillips Prepping Rough Planks for Solid Bodies Prepping Rough Planks for Solid Bodies by John Calkin Published online by Guild of American Luthiers, October 2021 There are plenty of places online where we can purchase prepped electric guitar body blanks. But who can refuse free wood when it is offered? Several rough planks of 2"×9"×12' poplar came to me out of the blue. They had been painted on two sides, but so what? They had spent years in a dry barn. I cut them down to 6' to fit them in my little pickup truck, hauled them home, and stored them in my mower shed for two more years. All photos by John Calkin I have been working on electric ukuleles, mandolins, and mini guitars, and that is where the poplar is destined to be used. The first step was to cut a plank into 15" lengths using a sled on the table saw. Though it looks like the plank will be run against the fence, there will be plenty of clearance after the cut is set up. Two pieces sat evenly on the saw deck so I proceeded to run them through the drum sander, first the humped side and then the cupped side. One edge was sanded flat (but not perfectly) on the 6"×48" belt sander in order to run it evenly against the table saw fence while the other side was trimmed clean and perpendicular to the faces. In this photo, the second edge is about to be trimmed. That's as far as I will take them for now. They are shy of the 1 3/4" thickness used for most Fender electrics but plenty thick enough for smaller solidbodies. When the time comes, the shorter length will be sliced up to widen the longer piece as necessary, making the bit still covered in red paint irrelevant. Once joined the blank may be thinned even more to accept a top of figured wood, but that lies in the future. The three blanks off the board that rocked too much on a flat surface would still rock after thickness sanding, so they will get a slightly different treatment later. ◆
