An Unconventional Vintage Guitar Repair

(First published in Guitarist magazine, issue #482)

This month Alex dismantles a piece of 1960s American guitar history hoping to bring it back to its former glory.

As a repairer of guitars both old and new, I cover everything from minor set ups to time-consuming restoration projects. It might be valuable, worthless, historical or absurd; I feel like I’ve seen it all (seemingly, that is, until the next customer walks through the door). But what also fascinates me is the motivation that gets musicians to restore and repair instruments in the first place.

My favourite reason to fix a guitar is because the owner simply loves the sound of it. This makes for an interesting repair challenge when the very reason why the guitar sounds so good can have a lot to do with why it is broken in the first place. So it was that I found myself casting an eye over a very fine 1960s Harmony Sovereign acoustic guitar during the interval at a jazz gig last month. The primary complaint was that the guitar was not only difficult to play, but it was desperately out of tune further up the neck. However, it had a tone unlike any other guitar that my client had in his collection, and it was a valuable tool in his recording studio, despite its shortcomings.

When faced with any potential repair job I scan over the whole guitar to spot anything that looks out of place. For starters, there was very little saddle left poking out of the bridge of this guitar. Assuming it was built correctly in the first instance, this should have meant the strings were low to the fretboard, not high, so something really wasn’t right. The neck looked in reasonably good shape, although a professional refret would have definitely improved the feel of the fingerboard. It was only when I ran my hands over the soundboard that I could feel the obvious problem - it had dished the wrong way quite dramatically, even to the extent that the soundhole was quite severely distorted into a squashed oval shape.

Once I had the guitar back at my workshop I inspected inside with my fibre optic camera, and the bracing on the underside of the soundboard revealed all. Most steel-string acoustic guitars use Martin-style ‘X-bracing’ to stiffen the top of the guitar: primarily two overlapping softwood struts reinforce the thin spruce top allowing it to withstand the pull of the strings, with a further seven (or more) additional struts and patches for extra strength. However this guitar was ‘ladder braced’ with only four modest struts running across the grain and nothing else to support the areas of the soundboard around the underside of the bridge.

The bracing arrangement of an acoustic guitar has a direct effect on the sound, and in this instance I was confident that the secret of the sound of this guitar - and the reason my customer was so enamoured by the tone of it - was a direct result of the way the top was braced. The obvious way to fix its playability would have been to add braces to the top and put it back into the correct shape, but that would have fundamentally changed the character of its sound.

After a bit of chin stroking and procrastination I opted instead to change the angle of the neck, not by removing it but by taking off the back. This suddenly makes the guitar very flexible, so with a little pressure on the headstock the neck can be gently tilted back to pitch at the correct angle (slightly warping the sides of the guitar) and then the back is glued back to stabilise the whole arrangement. This realignment means the strings are now much closer to the fingerboard, and with a new saddle at the proper height the guitar has plenty of projection with all of its original tone intact.

It might still have a top that has more in common with a cereal bowl than a “flat top” guitar, but there is deep satisfaction that comes from fixing up a special-sounding guitar for a discerning client. It might not be perfect but as a fellow guitar maker once told me: “Strive for perfection, and settle for excellence”.

Book in your guitar for repair with Alex here.