Penny Guitars

I have made a much better job of the classical fret board this time. I must remember to get things right the first time because it can be a bit of a pain having to do the same job twice.

The fret wire should arrive tomorrow and I can get it finished.
I have been reading about gluing frets into the fret board. Like everything else with guitars there are those that do and those that don’t. I have reset the ‘set’ of my fret cutting saw and it is now 0.70mm and it was 0.62mm before resetting it. This fret board is flat and I think I may glue the frets in. I do have an engineering press in my workshop and I think I will make the necessary parts to be able to use it as a fret press.

I think it is important to know when I get something wrong and even more important to repair or replace anything that is not up to a certain standard.
The classical guitar I made has a substandard fret board, I made a bad job of it and I knew it wasn’t as good as it should have been, so I need to replace it.

My new purchase of the £3.78 iron from Tesco comes to the rescue. I used it to heat up the fret board and peel it off the neck, it took a little while to remove it but it came off cleanly with no damage to the neck. Now I just have to make a new fret board.

I have now finished repairing and tidying up this old classical. It has a nice tone and sounds much better with a saddle than it did without one. The soundboard looks much nicer with the scratched lacquer removed, I have coated the soundboard with beeswax to protect it from the various acids and other stuff found on human hands.

That is all the pictures there are of this guitar. The bridge was okay once glued into place, the back edge as can be seen in the above picture has a 0.5mm gap between the bridge and the soundboard but it only goes into the glued joint for less than 1mm.

This is without doubt a rather interesting guitar, made in a period (1960’s) when the words ‘Made in Japan’ were often taken as meaning ‘it must be crap’. The guitar looks okay and it plays really well with a nice sound.

How it sounds