Penny Guitars

A friend of mine bought a very old (1965) classical guitar model number 1663 made by a luthier with the initials R.M for the total sum of 50 pence. The guitar had a huge hole in the area of the tail stock and a friend of my friend repaired it with what looks like glass fibre. My friend brought the guitar for me to have a look at, if I said it was in very bad shape I would be understating the condition. The strings looked like they had been tied to the bridge by some crazy man on heroin. The saddle didn’t exist at all and when I pointed this out to my friend he felt sure that it was all as it was supposed to be. On further investigation the back of the bridge was ripped completely off the soundboard. The bridge was being held on by the front 10mm of the bridge. I think that sometime in the past someone had put steel strings on it and over the time that it was strung that way it was slowly peeling the bridge off the soundboard. I must admit I found it all rather amusing and interesting at the same time, I now have a little bit of experience of what happens when a classical guitar is strung with steel strings. It is good to have the chance to learn about this kind of thing and so I offered to repair the bridge and soundboard. I am not going to renovate this guitar, I am happy to leave the repair in the sides near the tail as it is, it feels solid enough. I just wanted to make it look reasonable and improve its playability.

Let’s have some pictures.

As can be seen I removed the bridge. I did this by soaking a towel in hot water and laid it on the bridge. I then placed my new £3.78 iron from tesco on full power and pumped steam from the iron into the towel pressing reasonably hard with the iron and especially onto the wings of the bridge. The bridge cam off easier than I expected but to be honest there wasn’t a great deal holding the bridge on.

The soundboard has so many digs, dents and scratches that I decided to completely remove the lacquer from it and wax it. I have finished rubbing the soundboard down and after steaming the bridge and flattening it out I have now glued the bridge in place and currently am waiting for the glue to fully set, so it will be left until tomorrow with the clamp on it.

The machine heads are of very poor quality and have a lot of play in them. If the guitar comes out okay then the intention is to put new machine heads on it. Also the frets from 13 to 19 inclusive have corroded, all the frets look like they are made of brass, I was going to change the frets but I don’t think I will now. I will clean up the 13 to 19 frets as best I can and the first 12 frets are not in  too bad a condition and it is only the first 12 frets that are used when playing this guitar.

Having given this guitar a good look over it appears that it is veneered on the back, sides and soundboard. I had to go pretty carefully when rubbing down the front as it would be quite easy to go right through the veneer. I imagine that a guitar the same as this one in mint condition would be quite collectable. I have a love of guitars and personally don’t really care much about what they are worth as collectables.

I will post more on this guitar when it is finished.

Finally managed to come up with a working bending iron that is both quick to get up to temperature and silent, unlike my hot air blowing one, couldn’t hear myself think when that was running.
So to explain how this one works and that it costs no more than the price of a couple of pints of beer.
Tesco sell a standard clothing iron for £3.78, it is a “Tesco Value IR08 Steam Iron”, with free delivery! Anyway I never bought one because I just pinched the wife’s iron and told her to get herself a new one, which she did. The iron is a 1440Watt steam iron. I stripped it down until I just had the aluminium base with the heating element inside. I cut off all the surrounding aluminium right back to the edge of the heating element. I tried using the iron with the thermostat it came with but the thermostat itself was a bit big and bulky, besides it was not possible to keep the aluminium pipe I had added to the base to the temperature I require, 350 to 400°C. I don’t have a thermometer that can measure those high temperatures so I use a water spray on the pipe and if the drops of water just bounce off without sizzling then that is close to bending temperature as far as I know. These irons are NOT designed to have the element drawing current continuously and being as I have a mains 13amp foot switch I started running a few tests and here is what I found.
Turn the power on for 10 seconds and then off for 20 seconds for 4 minutes and it is ready to use, once it is up to temperature keeping it there requires much less effort, I have fixed the “on time” to 10 seconds and the “off time” gets extended to about 2 minutes, I don’t have an exact off time yet as I do not have any sides to bend, so I will get it more accurate once it is being used.
I am controlling the on and off times of the power with a solid state mains relay rated at 10 amp. I am controlling the relay with a micro controller(PIC Chip), I have 3 BCD switches that I set the “off time” with, from 1 to 999 seconds.

Here is a picture of the whole thing.

In the background is the small power supply to run the micro controller that is in a small black box with the BCD switches on it. The chip I used is a PIC16F876 and the software is pretty trivial. I will report further on how this performs once I get to using it properly. I did have a small piece of mahogany to do a quick test, it had already been badly bent with my old hot air bending system, I managed to put two more bends in it that came out perfect. So I am well pleased so far.

Here is a picture of the mahogany looking like an ampersand.

I still have more work to do on my tools such as sharpening chisels and the plane. I will be starting to build two more guitars in about a week or so. It will all be placed on the blog here so keep popping back to see what is happening.

I have just bought the £3.78 iron from Tesco and it is being delivered free on Thursday. It will make a good backup plan if the current one fails for some reason and at £3.78 I just couldn’t resist especially as it would cost me about £5.00 in fuel just to drive to their store and back, so god know what it costs one of their trucks. What a crazy world!

Way back in the 1960s It took a big chunk out of my paper round earnings to buy strings for my guitar, so if a string broke, and it was usually the 1st string, then I learned how to tie reef knots in strings, it is not easy and you do get stabbed in the fingers a few times but it saved money.
Well I was doing a bit of extra work on the steels string and I snapped the first string between the nut and machine head. I only have one set of the slinky strings so I did what comes naturally and tied a reef knot in the string and it tunes up and plays nicely.

And there it is.
It has been about 42 years since I last broke a string.

I have been playing the steel string quite a bit and it is settling down quite nicely now. I will post an audio file of it later, I just need a bit more practice with those highly flexible slinky strings.