lmao that's a pretttttttttttty massive fail.

No kidding :( They wanted 78 bux for this thing too. I hope no one buys it.

watch, someone will buy it, then take it in to you a few months later xD

And I will ask why they bought it and tell them the truth which is that unless they want to pay me 3 times what the guitar is worth that getting that bridge fixed is impossible without stripping the finish from the top of the instrument and doing who knows what to the wood underneath.

There is nothing humane that will dissolve polyurethane glues.

LOLOL

What about inhumane things?

I could take a few things to it that cause pretty nasty chemical burns if you get it on your skin and melt plastic :/

wear gloves? xD

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh man. I remember Making a makeshift head nut out of a paperweight.

That could work out pretty well depending what the paper weight was made out of

Hot glue removes finish!?

It does when you have to pull it off do a structural crack repair :(

Oh. I know nothing about guitars.

lawl x3 wow...

I used JB Weld to put the bottom strap screw in because the hole was stripped, but that's about it

have you ever taken apart a first act acoustic? xD those things scare the SHIT out of me D:

What you mean with the completely non structural braces, bolted on bridges, plywood fretboards, brass frets and rattle can finishes etc, etc,? Yes, I have seen first acts.

Jb-weld in a screw hole is one thing (not to far off from what I would have done) this is is just disgusting!.

well my mom got me an acoustic first act a few years ago for christmas, and just recently I thought I'd take it apart. First my friend and I were gonna just rip out the frets to see what a guitar would sound like fretless, but we forgot to stop taking it apart after the frets xD we started ripping off the fretboard, which came off in chunks D: We gave up, and recently I finished taking it apart. I found under the fretboard that the truss rod is a fucking deadly SWORD! D:< Took me forever to rip the neck off with whatever fucking glue they used, but now I have the body as a little hand drum :D

Yeah, the frets were probably glued in, plus they are barbed. Pulling frets correctly is actually a pretty complex procedure. see: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3536840/

The "truss rod" in those things is just a metal reinforcement rod, which i might add is not even necessary. martin got along just fine for years with out any kind of truss rod.

first act guitars just make me sad. They are worthless. at the very least I wish parents would get their kids a johnson or ibenez or whatever.

Well pulling REAL frets is probably very complex, but my friend and I were able to do it fairly easy with just a flathead screwdriver xD

Honestly, yeah. I mean, if parents have tight wallets and want their kids to START on guitar, I mean... at LEAST get a squier, but just don't cry when it breaks down or the kids get smart enough to realize that they suck ass xD

yeah, squires for all there flaws are tough shit. The thing is, I used to teach guitar for a music school. Most kids get bought these really shitty instruments thats sound like crap and are really uncomfortable to play so they hurt their hands for crappy sounding music and give up in frustration when if their parents (who presumably want their kids to gain a love for music) had spent like $50 more they could have gotten a fairly good starter instrument that would serve them well for years. Hell i still have the first guitar I ever bought, and I still play it every once in a while:) It was a Kay strat copy that has a basswood body, maple neck and decent electronics.

dang... so far my guitar has held out for about 25 years now, all its needed is new knobs.

Nice! I like it when you can say that about an instrument. What kind is it?

it is a Franciscan, by Aria, not the prettiest guitar, but its still plays a good tune ^-^

I had an Aria 12string a few years back. those are pretty nice guitars:) The particular modal i had got the company sued by gibson since it was awfully similar to something of theirs. Then again gibson likes suing people.

do you still have it? or did it get sold or break?

well, It broke then I fixed it and sold it because bought a better 12 string. It got dropped by one of the baggage monkeys at the airport and a few braces were loosened and the bridge started coming up. I fixed the problems and gave it a pro setup with a compensated bone nut and saddle to increase the value and sole it for about $150.

figures the airport would break it, almost like UPS, what kind of guitar was it?

That Aria 12 string. I actually saw them drop it from the top rack of one of those luggage carts from my window.

dang, did they even do anything to repay or refund what they did?

nah, my dad wouldn't let me bitch to the flight attendant. this was years ago.

wow, well at least you have a newer 12 string ^-^

Yeah, its a better instrument. It's a solid spruce top at the very least. the company that made it was Madeira which was a student brand by Guild.

Looks and sounds nice ^-^

Ugh... that's worse than the time I saw someone post photos of a failed headstock repair where the guy who brought it to the shop used nearly a whole bottle of Liquid Nails!

O.O

WTF!?

Seriously?

Ugh, this kind of stuff really gets to me. The thing is, it's usually these home done repairs that are the hardest thing in the world to fix.

When I had to replace the neck on my Strat-o-copy, I bought a cheap pawn shop guitar and used the neck off that. The previous owner had apparently "repaired" a few frets by supergluing them in... so a few of the frets are all banged up!

I'd correct the mistake if it wasn't a ratty neck and I planned on getting a good quality one.

That is disgusting.

I'm going to go ahead and admit that the bridge on my piece of shi- uhh, guitar... is reinforced with a couple different types of glue. There's really no helping that thing though, it was firewood from the start! As long as it holds in the strings I will be okay.


Also this is probably better suited for a note, but I am curious if you do guitars from scratch on commission?

Well, generally the only glues used for guitar bridges are:

Hide (on high end stuff)
Aliphatic resin or "wood-glue" (for medium to high end)
Cyanoacrylate or "super glue" ( for medium to low end)


Anything other than that is kind weird or kinda...bad.
The thing is you want to use something thats strong, has the ability to separate controllably, and can transfer energy. The particular glue here succeeds quite well in the first category which makes it even more unfortunate that it sucks in the other two:/

I do do custom guitars and would really like to get some commissions. The problem is that I do custom and not homemade guitars and my prices tend to scare people off. I have 10 years repair, 3 years working in manufacturing as well as a specialized education under my belt though so I'm more than capable of doing some pretty neat stuff if you don't mind paying for it. If you note me I can give my messenger and or email and we could talk a bit. I'm pretty workable about trying to get you something for a reasonable price that will do what you need and I will also take trades and other forms of payment to an extent.

I tried using wood glue but the stuff we have is... bad? I dunno, it didn't really work. Ended up using superglue, which did help. It clearly has pulled up on the finish and paint though.

I'll send you a note sometime later today.

Wood glue actually does go bad after about a year or if you let it freeze. supergluing a bridge only really works if your glueing to the finish and not wood. wood tends to soak it up and cause it to cure weirdly creating a weak joint. I'll wait for the note :)

awwr wow, i know little bout instruments and even i know that's a really bad idea, ruining something beautiful with a "quick fix" about as dumb as my step dad was trying to fix the garage door the other day -.-

oh? 0.o What he do to the door?

he was trying to fix a bolt that had fallen out but got it in crooked instead of leaving it be and waiting for us to get home, hes lucky that we were able to fix it with a wrench, he was using pliers and tries to force it in, much more and he would have striped the bolt

Ah man. Pliers are like the most commonly misused tool of all time :(

Oh my god

God had nothing to do with this.

I don't think so either, I don't believe in god/gods. It's just a common thing I tend to say after it being basically programmed into my head since I was a child.

what. the. fuck.

jeese dude your icon makes that statement cute :3

But yeah, I raged pretty hard seeing this too.

Words cannot describe the annoyance.

Yeah, I had a 12 string that someone broke on me. They played it without my permission, and then just propped it against the way, where it promptly fell down, and cracked the case.

Having no finances, I fixed it with Elmer's, but it would never tune properly after that.

ouch man, that really sucks. at lease the polyvinyl resin you used isn't the worst thing you could use on wood. It can actually make a great joint! What broke?

I don't know what it is called, but the curved sides of the box itself.

Ah, yeah that can happen. The good news is, if it cracked it was made with real wood. the bad news is you need somebody to put in cleats to really fix it. It would also be good idea to check out the inside for braces that could have broken loose when that happened. the tuning issues lead me to believe that something pretty structurally important might have also been damaged like the neck joint, X braces, Transverse brace, etc. A dental mirror and a flashlight might be a good ting to take to it. Either way if its doing that you should maybe loosen the strings on it until you know exactly what's wrong. Maybe get the guy to pay for the damages?

Well, I took it in to a professional guitar repair shop, and they said it was not repairable.

And THIS is exactly why I contacted you about mah Gibson X3

You should bring that thing by sometime man. I really want to fix that thing, I love SGs and it's a shame yours is busted 'cause your a really good player. Plus we could jam :) I've got all kinds of neat stuff here to mess around with.

Ooh cool ^^ and thank you by the way. I still have some saving/earning to do to come up with the cash to fix it but other than that, I can run it by pretty much anytime

I openly admit my ignorance, I shall defer to a proper luthier in all matters of stringed anatomy

Well I see you every once in a while :) I would be happy to help you out if you or dad ever had problems with an instrument. As I recall he has a cool old Martin!

he does have a cool old Martin, and we have that unidentified guitar you might be able to identify for us

You should send me a pic of the later :)

I'll try and do that soon

I'd cry too :<

its like stripping the truss rod just above the nut D: and then leaving it with like half an inch to an inch of action D:

yeah :( in my humble opinion they should stop selling truss rod wrenches with guitars. Most people don't really know how the work and if they do end up using it to "fix" a problem, usually only cause damage.

mhmm like its terrible x.x slow small quarter turns but to strip it you really got to twist it hard, at like half turns x.x

Ok i gotta say im a lil redneck with my repairs at times *cough*Ducktape*cough* and seeing that even makes me go WTF O.o

there are any number of things that would have been a better idea that this. I mean the guy could have thrown bolts through the bridge, at least that would have been fixable.

2 things I never fix myself;

An automatic transmission on a car, and a musical instrument ^^

Not a bad philosophy. There are a lot of things I wont touch cause I don't know anything about them. I'm always afraid of causing one of these annoyingly hard to fix problems.

heh.its nice..when I do my last bridge on acoustick guitar so my bridge was next dey destroyed...

Guaranteed the guy didn't know the first thing about guitars. That is by far one of the biggest repair fails I have ever seen.

No doubt, thats almost certainly what it was. Otherwise this person didn't care :(